


at the center of the chocolate cosmos

by suheafoams



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Childhood Friends AU, Happy Ending, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Slice of Life, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-10 17:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 42,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15954278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suheafoams/pseuds/suheafoams
Summary: kingdoms are broken apart and destroyed by long, hard battles fought in the dead of winter, but four measly words had been all it took to break woojin’s heart into a thousand sharp fragments.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello everyone!!!!!!! 
> 
> I am…back after a long disappearance into the void.  
> please enjoy, even if only a little. 
> 
> (i'm also sorry that this might not be the pairing you expect from me but i love woochan—remember to stan stray kids)

Woojin is in the middle of sorting through the mail that’s accumulated on the dining table when Hyunjin barges in yelling, “Chan hyung is coming back this week!”

“Really?” Woojin asks, as he considers whether to keep a coupon from the new restaurant that’s opening up in Dunsan-dong. At least one of the younger kids will probably want it, so he puts it in his pile of mail to keep. He turns his head just in time to see Hyunjin nearly knock a pot over in his haste to get to the dining table, but pretends he doesn’t see or hear the chaos that the younger boy has created.  

“Yeah!” Hyunjin replies, still half yelling out of excitement, and his tail waves back and forth quickly in the air. “He sent a message in the group chat. You didn’t see it?”

“I haven’t looked at my phone for a while,” Woojin says, which is a small lie. He’d seen the group chat notifications from Chan, and just ignored them. He frowns down at the piles of mail that he’s attempted to sort, which look messier than the one pile he started with. “So I didn’t get the memo, yet.”

The enthusiasm in Hyunjin’s voice fades. “Oh.” He sits down, fidgeting like he has something to say but he’s not sure whether to say it, and Woojin glances at him.

“What is it, Hyunjinnie?”

Hyunjin peeks at him with one open eye. “…Are you and Chan hyung not on good terms anymore?”

“What makes you think that?” Woojin asks. He’s not going to be able to focus on sorting the mail like this, so he just props his hands on the edge of the table and looks at Hyunjin.

“You never come with us whenever we visit him,” Hyunjin says, his ears drooping. “It’s not like he lives in a different country.”

“I know,” Woojin sighs. “It’s hard to find the time, that’s all.”   

“It only takes an hour or two to get to Seoul,” Hyunjin counters, but he says it like he’s afraid Woojin will get mad at him for pointing it out. “And Chan hyung misses you.”

“I miss him, too,” Woojin says, in the tone of voice that usually gets Hyunjin to stop asking him questions he doesn’t want to answer. “But adults, no matter how much they miss each other, have their own, individual lives to worry about. Now, are you going to help me with dinner or go do your homework?”

In surrender, Hyunjin slinks off to study, grumbling all the way while Woojin goes back to sorting the mail.

Woojin hadn’t spoken very much to Chan the last time Chan was in town. He doubts much will change this time around.

 

✤

 

It’s late in the afternoon on Thursday when the bell hanging by the front entrance of the shelter jingles noisily, signaling the arrival of a new customer or one of the kids coming home early. Woojin can hear the sound from where he’s washing his hands in the bathroom, so he comes out as soon as he’s done, expecting to put on his polite face for someone interested in looking at the younger animal hybrids. 

Instead of a stranger in his doorway, he finds Chan, setting down his duffel bag momentarily as he puts away his umbrella in the corner to dry. It’s been raining all day, and the evidence lies in the stubborn, extra ferocious curl of Chan’s damp hair.

“You’re early,” Woojin says. Chan must have been too preoccupied before to hear him approaching, because he startles at Woojin’s greeting.

“Oh!” he says. “Woojin.”  

“Sorry,” Woojin says. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” He had counted on Chan getting to Daejeon later in the evening, so that the ruckus and energy of the kids could wash out any awkwardness between the two of them. Right now, though, the youngest kids are sleeping or playing upstairs, and the high schoolers are still in school or off studying. Woojin scratches at the back of his neck as he catalogues the differences in Chan’s appearance since the last time he was here. He’s wearing a dress shirt with the top two buttons undone and black jeans that show slivers of pale thigh and knee.

Woojin doesn’t let his gaze linger for too long. “What’s the point of spending money on clothes if all you’re going to wear is ripped jeans?” he asks, eyes narrowed, which gets a laugh out of Chan. “And button up your shirt. There are only kids here, no girls to impress.”

“It’s fashion,” Chan says, like that’s sufficient enough of an answer, but he obediently buttons up his shirt anyways. Then he picks up his duffel bag, and puts it down on the floor along with his backpack in the dining room. “It’s a _look_.”

“Sure,” Woojin says. He follows Chan to the dining table, then passes him to go into the kitchen. “Do you want water or something?”

“Yes, please,” Chan replies.

Woojin fills a clean mug with water and places it carefully on a cork coaster in front of Chan. “There’s a guestroom that no one’s using right now,” he says, not really looking at Chan. “Nobody’s in there for the weekend, so you can put your bags in there later.”

“Oh,” Chan says, then pauses. “Actually…can I stay in your room?”

Woojin blinks, flustered. In all of the times that Chan has come home to visit, he’s never slept in Woojin’s room, even if the guestroom was occupied by someone else. The last time they shared a room was two years ago, right before Chan officially left the shelter and moved into his own place for his composing job in Seoul. “Why…?”

“I’m staying longer, this time,” Chan says. He’s smiling, but it’s tinged with uncertainty. Woojin can’t gauge what emotions Chan’s feeling, but that makes sense because he’s been out of practice at it for a while. “I said so in the group chat, but I guess you didn’t read it?”

“The notifications are a lot to keep up with,” Woojin says. His internal organs feel like they’re being thrown and tossed around against his will, and he wonders if Chan can hear his rapid heartbeat despite the distance between them. “Hyunjin told me, but I didn’t know the details. How long are you staying for?”

“A couple weeks?” Chan answers, sipping at his water. “I’ve gotten a lot of work done and songs completed, so I don’t need to be working in person at the company for the next month or so.”

“Oh,” Woojin says. “Okay.”  

Chan doesn’t miss the frown on Woojin’s face, because he says, “I can use the guestroom until someone needs it, if you want?”

“It’s fine,” Woojin replies steadily. “There’s no point in making you move around that much. Just put your things in my room later.”

“Thanks, Woojin. Will do,” Chan says, with a smile that makes Woojin’s heart feel uncomfortably tight.

“No need to thank me,” Woojin says. “It’s… not like I’ve ever said no to you.”

Unexpectedly, Chan’s face turns contemplative. “…You’re right,” he replies. “Why haven’t you?”

“Why I don’t say no to you, you mean?” Woojin asks, for clarification, and Chan nods. The air feels too tense. “Maybe because it would be bad manners to say no to the weak—”

“Very. Rude,” Chan interrupts, in protest, and Woojin laughs. This pattern of bickering, he can keep up with.

“How’s your work been going?” he asks. Chan looks surprised, like he hadn’t expected Woojin to care enough to ask a question like that.

Woojin’s always cared. It’s Chan who stopped caring first, so Woojin has resorted to pretending he feels the same way.

“Good, I think,” Chan says. He laughs, but it finishes closer to a sigh. “It’s hard, sometimes, or all of the time, but I have my own team working with me now, so things are a lot easier when I have two other people whose opinions I can bounce off of.”

“That’s good,” Woojin says.

“What about you?” Chan asks. “How have things been around here?”

“Fine,” Woojin says, and sucks at his lower lip. He wants to leave the room and stop thinking about all of the weird feelings in him that are suddenly coming out of the woodwork, but it would be rude to leave Chan alone, and Woojin would rather suffer silently on his own than come off as impolite. As a result, he continues hovering. “Are you hungry? I’m going to make dinner soon, but there are leftovers I can heat up for you, if you want.”

“I’m good for now, thanks. I can probably wait until dinner,” Chan says. He pushes a wayward curl up and away from his forehead, and Woojin watches the way the material of his shirt stretches across his chest. “Do you need help?”

“Not really,” Woojin says. “You should shower and change into comfortable clothes while I cook.”

“Okay.” Chan nods agreeably, and gets up to pick up his stuff. “See you in a bit.”

Twenty minutes later, Chan is back in the kitchen, still putting on his shirt as he walks in. Woojin catches a glimpse of the pale skin that dips right at the waistband of his cotton shorts, and pointedly directs his focus back onto the vegetables he’s stir-frying.

“There are extra slippers by the front entrance,” he says, scraping at a piece of onion that’s fused itself onto the side of the pot and is refusing to come off. “Your feet are going to get cold if you walk around barefoot.”

“Oh, yeah,” Chan says, and disappears into the common room, reappearing a few moments later with a pair of black slides on his feet. “What are you making?” 

Even without looking, Woojin can tell Chan’s face is right next to his, because of the barely-there tickle of hair and the scent of shampoo that suddenly floods his senses. Does Chan even know what he’s doing?  

“Stir-fry vegetables,” Woojin answers, stiffly. He has half a mind to call whoever Chan’s boss is and ask them to cancel his vacation, because Woojin wants his personal space back.  

“There are green peppers in there,” Chan notes. He’s close enough that his breath hits Woojin’s cheek. “I thought you didn’t eat peppers.”

“There are only so many options at the supermarket,” Woojin says, licking his lips. It gets overwhelming to try and make something new every week and keep avoiding certain foods. “I have learned to adjust in times of desperation.”

“Wow,” Chan says, chuckling, “You didn’t give me any slack when I was the one cooking back then.”       

“You could deal with it. You had the skills,” Woojin says, jutting his chin out defiantly.

“No, I didn’t! I’ll have you know, I almost went crazy with your impossibly high standards,” Chan protests, moving back and to the side of the stove so that Woojin can see the full extent of the displeasure on his face. “The other kids never gave me any trouble. Just you.”

“Your food was good though,” Woojin says, flashing a smile at Chan. “No complaints.” He turns off the stove and begins looking for an empty, large bowl to plate the cooked vegetables in. He plans to make a face at Chan’s back, but Chan ends up turning to look at him just as he sticks his tongue out, catching Woojin red handed.  

“This punk,” Chan says, reaching for Woojin’s neck, which sets Woojin off into a fit of high pitched laughter as he tries to duck away from being choked. For a moment, the weird tension between them dissipates, and Woojin almost forgets that it’s been years since he let himself be openly touched by Chan. 

 

✤

 

Woojin had been different, as a child. He wasn’t afraid of meeting strangers or being in a room without anyone to look after him, because he was used to looking after himself for as long as he could remember. He didn’t have any memories of who his parents were, only vague, blurry images in his mind of larger figures that wouldn’t sharpen at the edges no matter how hard he tried to make them.

There’d been the shelter director, though. The first clear, crisp memory Woojin has of his early life is of her taking him in to live in the animal hybrid shelter with a lot of other kids with furry ears and tails, even though he was fully human.

Because some of the hybrids couldn’t speak very well at first, Woojin had learned to touch in order to communicate and understand other people. Words only possessed the meanings that were assigned to them, but body language conveyed mountains of emotion through the smallest of movements. From just a glance, Woojin could tell whether one of the animal children were going to burst into tears because of how uncomfortable and scared they were feeling, so he was often on standby whenever new kids were being brought into the shelter or being observed by customers interested in adopting them, in case they needed to be comforted and calmed down.   

He’d just turned six when the director brought a new boy into the shelter. The boy’s hair had been a curly, knotty mess, and he’d hid behind the shelter director, small hands fisted in the soft fabric of her skirt. Woojin had not spotted any ears, and he’d gotten excited at the prospect of having someone more like him around. _Human._  

Without much of a brain to mouth filter, he’d asked directly, “Who’s that? A new hybrid?” He couldn’t get his hopes up, too much, even if there weren’t any ears perched on top of the boy’s whirlwind hair. Maybe he was a lizard, or some new species of animal hybrid Woojin had never seen before.

“No,” the director had said, nudging the new boy out in front of her. Woojin had been impatient and surged forward to get a better look at the new kid, who’d in turn, looked back up at the director in uncertainty and with a little bit of fear. He’d been so cute that Woojin had desperately wanted to hug him, but had held back. Sudden physical contact wasn’t good for new hybrids, or new scared children in general.

For sure, the boy was human. There was only smooth, pale skin on his hands, no fur or scales or feathers, and he didn’t have a tail trailing out behind him either.

“This is Bang Chan. He’s not a hybrid, but he’s going to be living with us from now on.” 

“Hello,” Woojin had said, cheerfully, and Chan had finally, in that moment, made eye contact with him. “I’m Woojin! How old are you?”

“Six,” Chan had hesitantly replied, apprehensive.

In response, Woojin had taken Chan’s hands in his with delight, and exclaimed, “Me too! We’re both six. That means we’re friends.”

“Oh,” Chan had said, like he wasn’t so sure about that.  

“Why don’t you show Bang Chan around?” the shelter director had said, tucking the folds of her skirt neatly behind her knees as she kneeled down to talk to Woojin. “I’m going to be taking care of a few other new kids, and you can show him where everything is before we eat lunch.”

“Yes!” Woojin had exclaimed, in very high spirits now that he knew Bang Chan was human, and the director had laughed at his excitement.

“I hope you like it here,” Woojin had said, after he’d showed Chan the common rooms, some of the bedrooms, and the large garden located in the back of the shelter’s outdoor section. He’d still held onto Chan’s hand, because it had made sense, to continue holding onto someone who was feeling scared and alone. The only new additions to the shelter recently had been babies or older hybrids that wouldn’t want to play with Woojin, so Woojin was extra proud, to be able to take care of someone that could understand him and be his friend, too.

“I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a long time,” Woojin had added, after thinking more.  

Chan had smiled at him, sweet but unsure, and at that moment, something unrecognizable had bloomed inside of Woojin’s six year old chest.

 

✤

 

The shelter breaks out into chaos when Hyunjin, Felix, Seungmin, and Jeongin come home.

“Chan hyung!!!!!!!” The four of them bellow in unison, not even bothering to take off their backpacks before smothering the older boy in a hug.

“Hello…my…wonderful…kids,” Chan croaks in between choked breaths. Woojin holds in a laugh. “How are all of you?”

“Great,” Seungmin chirps.  

“Good!!” Jeongin says.  

“Okay,” Felix says, voice deep, but then he laughs, high pitched and squeaky.

“Just dying from mock exams,” Hyunjin adds on. “How are you, hyung??”

“I’m good,” Chan says, once the they release him from their chokehold of a group hug. They used to be so much smaller, but they’re all around the same height now, Hyunjin a good seven centimeters taller than Chan. “I’m taking a mini vacation from work to come and have fun with you guys!”

“They’re preparing for college entrance exams,” Woojin says, crossing his arms. “You can’t make them play too much.”

“Ah yes,” Chan says, revising his words. He straightens up into his Proper Adult stance. “I will also have to work on music production even though I’m not at the company, so maybe only controlled amounts of fun.”

“Boo,” Hyunjin says. “Woojin hyung’s a party pooper.”  

“Say that again, Hyunjin,” Woojin says, and Hyunjin makes a noise of defiance that’s somewhere in between a bark and a _hmph._    

The kids chatter away at Chan, manners completely washed down the drain as they fight over who’s telling what story first to the older boy, and Chan listens diligently, as he always does, adding in reactions and asking questions only when they’re needed. It’s a nostalgic image, because Chan visits so rarely and having everyone together like this reminds Woojin of old times, when he and Chan had just graduated from high school and were finally getting along as well as they were when they were children.

Even so, Woojin can see the fatigue written in Chan’s limbs and the mild droop of his eyelids that means he’s feeling sleepy, and he lightly interrupts the conversation as Seungmin is winding down from one of his stories about his rude classmate.

“Hey, you guys haven’t eaten yet, and Chan’s tired,” Woojin says, after he’s set out four clean bowls and plates on the dining table. “Let him go rest.” 

“Sorry, Chan hyung,” Seungmin says, at the same time that Felix, Jeongin, and Hyunjin chirp phrases with similar sentiment. 

“Nooo, don’t be,” Chan says, ruffling the younger boys’ hair. “I’m going to be here for a while, so I’ll listen to all of your stories eventually, okay? No rush.”

“Okay~” the four of them say, agreeably, and they sit down to eat while Chan excuses himself to go unpack and sleep.   

In the morning, Woojin wakes up quietly, making sure not to be noisy as he gets dressed for the day. Chan is sleeping facing the wall, so that saves Woojin the anxiety of having to constantly look at Chan’s face to see whether he’s woken up or not.  

He goes through his usual weekday routine, waking up the kids who aren’t already getting ready themselves. Jeongin tends to be the hardest to fully wake up, so he goes into the younger boy’s shared room with Seungmin first. Seungmin is already up, scrolling through his phone while swathed in his blankets, and Woojin reminds him to make sure both of them get ready on time.

When he’s finished acting as the human alarm for Hyunjin and Felix, Woojin goes into the kitchen to make sandwiches to go with the leftovers that had been packed yesterday for today’s lunches. Half an hour later, the four boys are out the door, with the exception of Jeongin being a little sleepy eyed and tripping over everything, including the doorstep.

With a little bit of alone time before the shelter is set to open, Woojin makes some tea for himself and snuggles into the comfort of his jacket, relishing the cool morning temperature before noon hits and makes everything hot and humid. His eyes are closed when he hears someone making their way towards the kitchen. Woojin opens one eye after the footsteps stop just next to him.

“The kids went to school?” Chan’s cheeks are rosy from sleep. His lips are puffy and pink, and Woojin turns his head once he realizes he’s stared for too long.   

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re up early.”

“Yes, I _am_ awake,” Chan says in confirmation, though he seems to be saying it more for himself than Woojin, and his eyes are still half closed as he leans against the counter for support. There’s an old spaghetti sauce stain on his white shirt. _Cute_ , Woojin thinks, and then he cuts the rest of that thought off as Chan speaks again. “You should have woken me up to help you.”

“There isn’t that much to do,” Woojin says. “And you’re back home to take a break, not to do more work.”

Chan yawns, covering his mouth with his hand. “You work too hard,” he says.

Woojin raises an eyebrow. “The guy who overworks himself all the time is telling me I’m working too hard?” Even if they don’t talk as much as they used to, there’s no way Chan’s gotten out of the habit of staying up late into the night working on whatever project he can’t stop thinking about. 

“I’m on a vacation right now,” Chan says, pouting. “You don’t take any days off, like, ever.”

“You know what it’s like if I take a day off,” Woojin says. “I get more stressed than if I had just continued working normally.”   

“The kids aren’t actual babies,” Chan replies. “This shelter has part-timers too, right? The shelter won’t fall into the depths of hell if you’re not there for one day.”

“I know that,” Woojin says. It’s just that he likes attending to the big things as well as the details, and it’s inevitable that details will be missed if he puts someone else in charge and takes time off to rest.  

Chan must know that, too, because even if they’ve been in a weird state of limbo in terms of friendship for the last two years, they’ve known each other for thirteen more. “Well, at the very least, I’m back in town to get a break from the stress of my job, not to be completely useless. You can let me help you while I’m here,” he says. “What’s the schedule for today?”

“I’m going to do a Costco run later, once the part-timers arrive,” Woojin says.

“I’ll come with you,” Chan insists, and Woojin eyes him warily.

He’s not sure how he’s supposed to adjust to how constant and overwhelming Chan’s presence can be, after months and months of him getting used to doing things on his own. It’s weird to miss someone when they’re only an hour or two away, but they haven’t talked about the giant mountain in between them, because it’s never been about the physical distance that separates them, just the words that have piled up into a wall that Woojin can’t see over. And even if Woojin enjoys having Chan around again, he doesn’t want to, because he knows he’ll have to go back to nothing when Chan’s time is up and he has to go back to his life in Seoul, where his composing job awaits and where Woojin can’t reach him.  

“You’re driving, then,” Woojin finally says, against his better judgment, and Chan grins triumphantly at him.

“Fine by me,” Chan answers. “Driving here isn’t as much of a nightmare as it is in Seoul. Just let me know when you want me to be ready by.” 

While Chan sets about making himself breakfast, Woojin gets ready to open up the shelter for the day, and sweeps around the entrance where the most dirt and debris gather, making sure to keep the clean indoor slippers on the side so that no dust gets swept onto them.

Jeongyeon arrives just as Woojin flips the sign to indicate that the shelter is open. Her hoodie, half zipped up, is sliding off one of her shoulders because of her backpack straps, and one chunk of her hair is sticking up in comical fashion. “Woojin oppa! Sorry I’m late!” she says.

“It’s okay,” Woojin says. “Did something happen?” Being late is unusual for Jeongyeon, since she typically gets here at least ten to twenty minutes earlier than when her shift officially starts.

“I had to clean up after my roommate’s cats because one of them vomited or something and my roommate was already in class,” Jeongyeon replies. She shakes her hair and combs it back in place with her fingers.

Woojin grimaces. “Is the cat alright?” 

“I think so? To be honest, I couldn’t tell whether it was vomit or poop because I didn’t actually see which cat did it,” Jeongyeon says, putting her hands on her hips as she tries to catch her breath. “You should be more concerned about me, oppa. I ran so hard, I think I might pass out.”

“You can’t do that,” Woojin says, chuckling. The days that Jeongyeon comes in are always lively. “You’ve got children to take care of.”

“I can do that…definitely…for sure,” Jeongyeon says, taking her backpack off and dropping it on the floor. She drops into a chair and slouches until she looks like a jello pudding that’s about to slide off the edge of a plate. “Just give me a minute.”

“Who is that I hear?” says a voice from the kitchen.

Jeongyeon twists her neck to see who it is, and screams, “Chan oppa?!”

“The one and only,” Chan says, and yelps as Jeongyeon leaps out of her seat and pretty much picks him up while squeezing him in a bear hug at the same time.

“What the heck, oppa, I didn’t know you were coming back,” Jeongyeon says, lightly punching him in the shoulder. Chan pretends to half crumple at the attack, and Jeongyeon laughs. “Did you get a day off or something?”

“I got a couple weeks off, actually,” Chan says.

“Wow, that’s nice,” Jeongyeon says, in a tone of pseudo-jealousy. “Sometimes I ask for an hour off my shift and Woojin oppa looks like he’s about to strangle me.”

Chan shrugs and shakes his head disapprovingly. “Employee abuse, am I right?”

“The nature of your job is completely different from Jeongyeon’s,” Woojin cuts in, before the two gang up on him. “Don’t give her strange ideas.”

“What kind of boss just lets someone take off for a month, though?” Jeongyeon asks. “That’s a lot of trust towards one person.”

“It must be because I’m so dependable,” Chan says, in a sing-song tone, and Woojin rolls his eyes while Jeongyeon simply fake hurls in response.

They head out once Jeongyeon’s caught her breath and settled into taking over while Woojin’s gone.

 

✤

 

“Your singing voice is so pretty,” Chan says, when they’re halfway there. “I always remember it sounding nice, but in person, it always sounds even better.”  

Woojin stops mid-note and looks at Chan, surprised.

At the silence, Chan asks, “What?” He glances momentarily at Woojin before directing his eyes back to the road. “That’s not the first time I’ve said that.”

“No, it’s just…” Woojin goes back to staring out the window, resting his chin in the palm of his hand. There’s a mother crossing the street with her daughter in front of where Chan has stopped at the red light, and a pair of high school boys are giggling as they bump shoulders with each other and pull their hoods over their heads to protect themselves from the sprinkle that’s soon going to be a downpour. It brings back feelings of nostalgia, even if Woojin didn’t particularly enjoy his high school years or running around in the cold, messy rain as a student. “I didn’t expect you to be listening.”

“We’re sitting in the same car, right next to each other,” Chan says, with a wry laugh. When Woojin looks over, he realizes Chan is watching the two high school boys cross the street, too. “I’d have to be plain deaf and dumb not to listen to you sing, Woojin, when you do it so rarely.”

“Do you work with a lot of singers, at your job?” Woojin says. He’s only caught bits and pieces of what Chan does on a regular basis from Hyunjin or Felix.

“Yeah, I guess,” Chan says. The car starts moving again, and the bright neon signs of individual shops bleed into each other, turning into rapidly transforming bands of color. “Sometimes I ship off the demos to higher up people who then work with the singers, because they’re in charge of the final sound and impression of everything, but there are also times when I’m the one in the recording studio working with the music artists themselves.”

“I see,” Woojin says, and goes back to humming.      

Finding parking in the Costco lot isn’t that hard on a Friday morning, and Chan manages to snag a parking spot relatively close to the main entrance.  

“This is so nice,” Chan says, when they get out of the car. The rain is still a gentle drizzle, so Woojin doesn’t bother opening up his umbrella, just pulls up the hood of his jacket and tucks the umbrella under his arm. Chan follows suit. “Back in Seoul, you can’t even dream of driving to Costco.”

“Really?” Woojin hums. He feels around in his pockets for his wallet, and locates it in his right butt pocket. “Is it that bad?”

“I’ve heard stories of people waiting one to two hours just for parking, so in the few trips I’ve made, I always took the subway with a couple of my friends and carried everything I bought,” Chan says.

“Sounds like a mess,” Woojin remarks.

“It _is_ a mess,” Chan responds. “A big, hot mess that everyone was trying to get in and out of, all at once.”

Woojin shows his membership card to the stoic store associate at the entrance, and Chan speeds off to grab a shopping cart once they’re inside the store. He makes a show out of the whole thing, pretending to have trouble getting the carts to un-stick from each other and making ugly faces every time someone gets in his way. The last couple of meters, he jumps and keeps both feet on the bottom of the shopping cart and cruises his way towards Woojin.

“You’re going to hurt yourself or someone else,” Woojin says, using his foot to stop the cart before it ends up hitting him, and Chan hops off of the cart sadly, draping his arms across the handle so that he can start pushing it normally.

Despite the constant messing around, Chan proves to be a worthy addition while they’re trying to knock off all of the items off Woojin’s list of things to buy. He does most of the heavy lifting and makes himself in charge of retrieving whatever item Woojin calls out, and Woojin only has to navigate the cart around, which isn’t that hard considering they’re not caught up in the weekend crowd of Costco shoppers.     

“Who the heck is asking for grape juice boxes?” Chan complains, after lifting two 32-packs of Barney purple juice boxes and fitting them into the bottom storage section of their shopping cart. He pokes his head over Woojin’s shoulder to look at Woojin’s phone.  “Wow, the fact that it has to be grape is actually written on your list.”  

“You gonna attack some seven year olds for liking grape juice?” Woojin asks, with a laugh.  

“Hell yea,” Chan says, cracking his knuckles for extra effect. “Why settle for grape juice when apple and orange juice exist? Whoever drinks it, I just wanna talk with them real quick.”

“As of late, the kids have been fixated on grape flavors, apparently,” Woojin explains. “And we still have enough of the other flavors back home in case they suddenly get over their grape phase.”   

“Okay,” Chan says. “How many more things do we need to get?”

“Four, five?” Woojin says, reading through his list from top to bottom. “Our next stop is…rotisserie chicken!” He pumps his fist in the air, because this item’s more for him than for any of the kids, who don’t really care about what kind of meat they’re eating as long as it tastes good and they have ketchup on the side.

“Of course,” Chan says knowingly, and laughs as he heads towards the deli section, Woojin trailing behind him with the cart. 

When they get back, they start unloading all the dry groceries in to the storage pantry, which is located in the other side of the building near the playrooms where the younger children can be observed by people interesting in adopting. At the noise, Jeongyeon comes out of one of the rooms, several hybrid children following her and poking their heads out behind her hip and legs to see what she’s looking for. Her hair is a mess again, and she’s got stains all over her work apron.

“Wild morning?” Chan asks, holding in a laugh, and Jeongyeon rolls her eyes as she claps several times to clean off her flour dusted hands, white flour radiating from her in soft, cloudy waves. All of the children scatter at the sudden noise except for one small, black kitten.

“You’re so funny, oppa,” she replies, in irritation, and shrieks as the kitten hybrid jumps on her, clawing his way up onto her shoulders and then resting his small paw hands on her head. “Sangwoo, get down from my head, please.” Instead of what Jeongyeon asks him to do, Sangwoo digs his paws further into the sweater she’s wearing, and Jeongyeon continues gently chastising him while trying to separate him from her sweater without creating any further casualties.  

Woojin puts down the box he’s holding in his arms on the ground, and succeeds in coaxing Sangwoo to slowly let go, using his hands to make sure every claw is cleared from the fibers of Jeongyeon’s clothes as he lifts the kitten boy up and off of her shoulders.

Sangwoo struggles in Woojin’s grip until Woojin sits in a nearby chair and starts scratching behind his ears, his smooth fur getting all fluffy from the disruption, and then the fight in Sangwoo fades. He eventually settles and relaxes into Woojin’s arms, kneading his paws into the fabric of Woojin’s pants.

A loud yelp comes from the doorway of the closest playroom, and Jeongyeon goes in to resolve whatever dispute has occurred in her absence. 

“You don’t want to bother Jeongyeon noona when she’s working so hard, right?” Woojin says, jiggling his thigh to lull the kitten into a state of calm.

“Noooo,” Sangwoo replies, voice vibrating hilariously due to the fact that he’s sitting on top of Woojin’s leg. “I just—” He frowns. He curls his tail around himself, sadly. “The other kids were crowding around her, and I didn’t get a chance to hug her all morning.”

“You won’t be able to get a hug from Jeongyeon noona if you attack her like that,” Woojin says, and with a grin, he leans in to whisper, “You should think of other ways to get her attention~!”

Sangwoo’s eyes widen, ears perking up in interest. “Like what?” 

“You could ask her if she ever needs help cleaning up, or make her gifts when you have free time,” Woojin says. “You shouldn’t climb onto people’s heads without their position, _especially_ if you want them to like you.”

Sangwoo nods his head vigorously in understanding, and rubs the top of his head against Woojin’s chin in affection, purring loudly. In response, Woojin digs his fingers into Sangwoo’s ribs, tickling him until he’s laughing hysterically and pushing Woojin’s hands away.

Once Sangwoo’s back in the playroom, Woojin belatedly realizes that Chan’s still in the room, and that he’s being stared at.

“What?” Woojin asks.

“You’re so good with kids,” Chan says, and Woojin snorts.

“Considering the type of job I have, I kinda have to be, don’t I?” Woojin says.

“I know _that_ ,” Chan says, kicking lightly at Woojin’s foot. There’s a twist to the corner of his mouth, which means he’s trying to fight off a smile. “The shelter director was good with kids, too, but not in the same way that you are. Even if she tried her best, she would have never been able to tame Sangwoo as quickly as you did.”

“When they’re younger, it’s easier,” Woojin says, standing up so they can go back to the car. “It’s either snacks, belly scratches, or telling them how to successfully make their crush like them back without pulling any pigtails. Kids are perfectly transparent as long as you’re really looking at them.” Kids are so refreshing to be around, because they’re either wonderfully or painfully honest, and Woojin does his best to make sure the hybrids at the shelter don’t grow up feeling broken or unwanted just because they aren’t adopted out before a certain age. That includes teaching them to be more straightforward with their feelings, whether it’s through words or actions, and knowing when they’re not getting the attention they need so that he can give it to them.

“You were good with me, too,” Chan says. He presses the appropriate button on the car remote and pops the SUV trunk open in one swift motion, surveying what else they need to bring inside. “I’m not sure what I would have done without you.”

He smiles wide, heart shaped lips and all, and Woojin feels like all of the air has been sucked out of his lungs. Without Chan around…Woojin would have been fine, because you can’t miss what you’ve never known, but he also would have never understood what it meant to feel at home just by seeing someone’s face.

“You’d probably have been a mess, although…” Woojin pauses for extra effect.

When he doesn’t finish, Chan turns his head to look at Woojin. “What?” he asks, curious. 

“You _did_ turn out a mess, even with me around,” Woojin says, watching gleefully as realization and annoyance dawn on Chan’s face. “Who knows what would have happened if I wasn’t there at all?”

“Asshole,” Chan says. “I’m going to chuck these juice boxes at you.”

Woojin only sticks out his tongue, then grabs the still hot container of rotisserie chicken and dashes off with it before Chan and his wrath catch up with him.

 

✤

 

In the afternoon, Minho drops by, still wearing his work shirt with the logo of the convenience store he works at. He makes an appearance once or twice a week, after his shifts are done, because he knows Woojin won’t voluntarily leave the shelter as long as he still has work to do. He mostly sits around and talks shit, but sometimes he helps Woojin out if Woojin needs the extra pair of hands.

“Helloooo,” he says, dragging out the end of the word. In his left hand is an umbrella half as big as him, the type that can’t be shrunk down into a compact bundle, and in his right hand he’s got some takeout in a white plastic bag. Woojin can smell the grease from where he’s sitting behind the front desk, updating information in their internal file records.

Minho’s hair is wet, but it’s always agreeable regardless of whatever environmental conditions hit it, so it’s not any straighter or curlier than it is when it’s dry. “How is it that you’ve got a giant umbrella to cover up that big head of yours and all of your hair still ends up getting wet?”  

“How is it that you’re only twenty-one and you’re already behaving like a nagging grandma?” Minho fires back, after making sure there aren’t any customers hanging around in the common area who would take offense. He drops his umbrella into the umbrella holder, the sheer size of the thing smushing all of the other ones that are already in there.  

“Say that again, Lee Minho,” Woojin says lowly, making sure that Minho can see the way he’s holding his pen like a weapon, and Minho sticks out his tongue. 

“Don’t be violent,” Minho says, “though, you’d never do anything to me with the kids around.”

“Let’s hang out in that narrow alleyway a block from here, then,” Woojin says, putting the pen down so that he can crack his knuckles, one by one. “I’ll show you how I really feel about you.”  

“You gonna confess to me where no one can invade our privacy, Kim Woojin? How romantic,” Minho bats his eyelashes, and Woojin rolls his eyes.

“Why are you here anyways?” 

“I’m here to visit my very good friend. Have you seen him?” Minho responds, and he ducks as Woojin chucks an empty pen carton at him. “Are you trying to kick me out already?”

“Yeah, your face makes me want to pass out,” Woojin says, without any hesitation and Minho sets his takeout box on the small coffee table in the center of the room with an exaggerated _thud_.

“You’re constantly rude,” Minho says, sitting down in a chair and making himself at home as he takes out napkins and plastic eating utensils from his bag. When he’s opened his takeout container of rice and chicken and pickles, he slicks his hair back so that water droplets won’t fall onto his food. “Why do I feed you chicken and bless you with my presence on a regular basis?”

“Because my presence is twice as much of a blessing to you,” Woojin says, hitting save on the spreadsheet once he’s finished typing in the last updates about the hybrids that have been adopted. He crowds into Minho’s space, wrapping his arms around Minho’s neck in a tight back hug and opening his mouth as indication for Minho to feed him.

“Who said I was going to share?” Minho says grumpily, but he still shovels a spoonful of chicken balanced on top of rice into Woojin’s mouth. “Hope you choke, dummy.”

Woojin doesn’t, and he smiles at Minho obnoxiously while chewing.

“What’s new around here?” Minho asks. “Any wild hybrid chases or weird customers?”

“Not much,” Woojin says, then thinks of Chan, who’d taken off a couple hours earlier in order to partake in a “soul searching stroll,” but had promised to be back before evening hit. “Well, Chan’s in town for a couple of weeks.”

Minho fidgets with his straw wrapper until Woojin takes it from him, ripping the plastic off easily and then handing it back to Minho.

“Thanks,” Minho says, then: “Weeks? He doesn’t usually do that, right?”

“No,” Woojin replies. “The longest he’s visited before this was maybe three, four days? Just weekends, usually.”

“Then what does he mean by barging back in here and disrupting your peace?” Minho says. He sips his drink viciously, his eyes crossing without him meaning to, and Woojin snorts in amusement. After smacking his lips a couple times, Minho continues with, “Didn’t he book it out of here as soon as he thought he could make it in Seoul with the big shots?”

“It’s not like that,” Woojin says, with a frown. Minho tends to take Woojin’s side of things and blame Chan for everything else that’s remotely negative, but Woojin doesn’t think Chan’s in the wrong for chasing the stars when he’s fully capable of reaching them. It’d been clear from the beginning that Chan was obsessed with every aspect of music, and staying home in tech valley Daejeon, the dreamland of aspiring computer science and engineering majors, wasn’t going to bring forth any good opportunities for him. Woojin shakes the hair out of his eyes, hoping that it’ll sort out and reorganize the thoughts in his head, too. “Ahhh, I don’t know, I don’t get it either.”

“You were so sad, when he left,” Minho says. “Does he know that?”

(Woojin had stayed in bed for days after Chan left, only getting up occasionally to pee or eat or drink water. Minho had shown up in his room on the end of the third day, huffy and stressed and angry, because Woojin had turned off his phone and consequently failed to return any of Minho’s calls or messages.

“What’s up with you?” Minho had asked, the hard line of his mouth demanding a good explanation for Woojin’s lack of presence, and Woojin had stared up at him from the cocoon of his blankets, nose red and eyes glassy.

“He didn’t bother telling me anything before he decided to leave all by himself,” he’d replied, though most of the sound had been absorbed into his blankets and not so much in the air between him and Minho.

“What? Say that again, I can’t hear you.”

Woojin had pulled the blankets down, then, in order to talk clearly. “Chan got a job composing for a big company. He moved, and he’s not coming back.”

“Chan?” Minho had asked, even though he’d seen the empty bed on the opposite side of the room as soon as he came in, and had probably already guessed what it meant. “…Fuck him. What kind of asshole doesn’t tell his best friend beforehand that he’s leaving?”

“I’ll just perish,” Woojin had said, rolling over, and Minho had pulled him right back.

“You can’t go perishing anywhere just because you want to,” Minho had said. “Life doesn’t wait around for losers to stop being losers. You’ve got animal children and little brothers to take care of, and Chan’s not some fuckin’ girl that you’re gonna get hung up over.”

Woojin had flinched, because Minho had hit much closer to home than he meant to, and Chan, in some ways, was like a girl who Woojin was hung up over.)    

“No, he doesn’t know,” Woojin says. He picks off a piece of lint from his sleeve. He should probably find time to do laundry, tomorrow morning. “No point in him knowing anyways. I’m not really on talking terms with him, when he’s not in town visiting.”

“Good,” Minho says. Woojin assumes that this response is referring to the fact that Chan and Woojin aren’t close anymore. “He’s a punk.”

“Aren’t you a punk too?” Woojin says, smiling.

“I’m a _loving_ punk,” Minho says, and before Woojin can contest that statement, he adds, “I’m not good for much, I know, but I visit you and talk to you, and I don’t leave you in the dark when I’m about to make some big decision that would change both of our lives.”    

“Fair enough,” Woojin says. “I guess you _are_ a loving punk.”  

Minho’s eyes glaze over as he licks his lips. There’s a question he wants to ask, and it’s forming in the way his eyebrows scrunch and the way the corners of his mouth pull down, lower lip sticking out into a pout of deep thought rather than insolence. “When are you going to go back to school?” he eventually asks.

“I don’t know,” Woojin says.

“You always say that,” Minho says. “I can tell it’s just your blanket response because you don’t even think about it. But you’re not going to go back, are you?”

“I took a leave of absence to give myself space and time to think about what I really wanted,” Woojin says. “I don’t think I know that yet, but I don’t have the luxury of spending money on college courses while I try to figure it out.”

A paper packet of wooden disposable chopsticks is nestled underneath one side of Minho’s takeout container, and Minho moves it to the side so that it doesn’t make the container lopsided.

“You gonna keep taking care of animal children forever?” Minho says. He doesn’t mean it in a condescending way, Woojin knows, because Minho loves the animal hybrid children as much as an outsider who’s never grown up in the shelter can.  

“I don’t know that, either,” Woojin says. “I’m still worrying about the three that are going to graduate from high school for now.” The approaching date of the college entrance exams mixed with Hyunjin, Seungmin, and Felix’s nervous energies don’t really give Woojin any extra moments to think about himself, but he supposes that will change quickly when the three of them go away to university and Jeongin is the only teenage hybrid left in the shelter. But even after the last of the hybrids Woojin is closest to move on from the shelter to bigger, better things, Woojin isn’t sure if he’ll be able to.

There’s something about this place that he’s tied to, for better or for worse, because it’s the closest thing he’s had to a home his whole life. It _is_ his home, because he’s lived here since he was six, but it’s also home in the way that he feels relief whenever he sees the familiar doorway after returning from a trip somewhere far away, and it’s home in the way that all of his muscles seem to relax as soon as he steps onto the cool, wooden floors, accepting their return into the place they belong most. He doesn’t really have a burning desire to leave, but at the same time, he wants to know what it would be like to go off and live on his own for a while, experience the world in a different sort of view. Maybe he’s just jealous, that Chan had the courage and selfishness to go after what he wanted with such conviction, and Woojin still doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life.

He’s more afraid, though, that if he reaches for the stars like Chan has done, that he won’t end up close enough to even feel their heat. That he’ll end up falling onto the cold, hard ground, unable to find any of the roots he started off with, and despite what he could gain, everything he could lose poses too large a risk for Woojin to take.

 

✤

 

Right after meeting for the first time, Woojin and Chan had quickly stuck to each other like glue, at home or outside of it. The shelter director had enrolled Chan as a new student at the primary school Woojin attended, and they’d ended up being in the same class. They’d separate themselves only when they were part of different groups for class activities, then sticking right back together as soon as break time started. Woojin liked the rest of his classmates well enough, but as long as Chan was around, Woojin couldn’t have cared less about them. He and Chan would sit together at lunch, swapping certain vegetables out of their own trays with each other because Chan didn’t like carrots and Woojin didn’t like mushrooms, but Chan was fine with mushrooms and Woojin was fine with carrots.

They possessed a shared love of music class, even if they only had it once or twice a week. Every opportunity they could get, they’d spend time in the music classroom with permission from their teachers, homeroom and music teachers combined, who were surprised at but not against the pair’s stronger interest in playing and banging around on instruments than being on the playground with the other kids.

The next school year, they’d been divided into different classes, and Woojin had been disappointed, but Chan had been devastated.

“How can Woojin _not_ be in my class?” he’d asked the shelter director, teary-eyed as he held onto a corner of Woojin’s striped shirt. The director had brought them, along with other kids from the shelter, to look at the freshly posted class rosters on the main office windows of the school, and she had only smiled wistfully at him, not knowing what else to do.

“Woojin can’t be with you all the time, Chan-ah,” she’d said, and even though she always meant for her words to be comforting, Chan had promptly burst into tears. It hadn’t helped, that Youngjae, a puppy hybrid the same age as Chan and Woojin, had been bouncing around in joy because he’d managed to end up in the same class with his best friend for the third year in a row. 

“He has to,” Chan had wailed, his voice coming out funny through a clogged nose. Woojin had been frozen between wanting to laugh and wanting to cry, too. “He’s _mine._ ”

“Don’t cry, Chan,” Woojin had said, taking Chan’s hands into his. He couldn’t bear to see Chan so upset, even if he was happy that Chan liked him this much. “There’s recess, and lunch. Walking to school and walking home, and all of the hours in a day that we’re not in school!” Chan’s stifled sobs had paused, for a little bit, and he’d wiped at his eyes, with some sort of motivation to stop sobbing up a river in the middle of their school hallway.

“Yes,” the shelter director had said. “And sometimes things we don’t want to happen have to happen so that we can grow from them. What if you end up finding more friends? You’ll have this many friends—” (she’d made a large circular gesture with her arms, then) “and Woojin, too!”

The only response Chan had given was to hold onto Woojin even tighter. “I don’t want more friends,” he’d exclaimed. “I want Woojin!” The shelter director had sighed, though it’d been more out of disappointment in her inability to comfort Chan rather than how difficult he was being, and she’d just patted him on the head before offering her last attempt at reassurance.

“Woojin will be right next door, Chan,” she’d said. “Anytime you need him, he’ll be right there for you.”

“That’s right,” Woojin had said, and in that moment he’d hoped, secretly, that Chan would never ever meet anyone he liked more than Woojin.

In the end, things were fine. Chan made it through his first day of school without shedding any tears, but he’d pounced on Woojin the moment Woojin came out from his classroom for break time, as if they hadn’t giggled and shrieked their way walking to school earlier that morning.

“Do you like your teacher? Your classmates?” Woojin had asked. They’d gone to the reading garden, where a few other children were playing or reading, because Chan liked looking at the roses that parents had planted.

“Ms. Hong is nice, and so are my classmates,” Chan had replied, easily. “But I wish you were in my class, because you’re my closest friend.”

“Let’s go see if the music teacher is in when it’s lunchtime,” Woojin had said, eager to go back to their daily routine of playing with instruments. Chan had grinned at him, dimples showing, shoulders scrunched up in the most adorable way. He was completely different from the first day Woojin had met him, and Woojin had wondered if it was possible to like anyone as much as he liked Bang Chan.      

By the time they’d turned ten, Woojin could barely remember what it was like to go to school without Chan, same class or not, and he didn’t really want to, not when he always waited for the end of class to come, knowing that the only thing stopping him and Chan from going on more adventures was the door that his teacher would swing open at 3 o’clock. Then the world would turn from a room closed off by four walls into a vast land full of possibilities, for Woojin never lived a dull or sad moment as long as he was with his best friend.

 

✤

 

Old patterns are hard to break. Woojin’s mind is struggling to wrap itself around Chan behaving like the last two years haven’t happened, but his heart eagerly peels its empty spaces back open so that Chan can fill them again.   

Woojin hasn’t told anyone in particular where he is, but he finds Chan waiting for him on the second floor, right outside of the room where Woojin has been reading to a new kitten hybrid. Chaeyoung hasn’t been very social or spoken much since her arrival, but somehow, in the last hour, Woojin has managed to get her comfortable enough to sit in his lap as he reads her stories about cats, flipping through each illustrated page slowly so that she can look at the brightly colored images as long as she wants.

“Oh,” he says, when he comes out of the room and sees Chan. “How’d you find me here?”

“I asked around, but nobody was exactly sure, so I just looked in every room until I heard your voice in one of them,” Chan replies. “Are you…busy?” His eyebrows are raised, hopeful. Woojin wonders if that’s the same face he makes every time Chan comes into a room and invades the bubble of solitude Woojin is so used to.

“Not particularly,” Woojin says. “Why, what’s up?”

“Thought we could go for a snack slash meal in between lunch and dinner,” Chan says, wiggling his eyebrows. “You didn’t eat a real lunch, right? I’ll treat you to chicken.”

“A tempting offer,” Woojin says. Before, Chan had always wheedled his way out of having to pay for the two of them, if they ever went out to eat. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” Chan says. “Can’t I want to spend time with you?”

“That sounds even more suspicious,” Woojin says, in the most unenthusiastic voice he can manage, and he tries his best to ignore the way Chan’s eyes crinkle up in delight at the fact that Woojin hadn’t said no.  

They visit a military themed chicken restaurant that’s a ten minute walk from the shelter, roughly. Woojin has been here a few times, and he and Chan enter through a door that’s had so many posters and advertisements taped onto it, there’s hardly any glass left to look through. The interior is dark and industrial looking, all of the chairs and tables made up of dark colored wood or greenish-gray metal that’s smooth to the touch. 

When their dakgalbi arrives, Woojin breaks the easy atmosphere. He’s drawn to Chan the way a magnet is pulled back into another magnet any time they get close enough, but he doesn’t understand Chan’s motivations for coming back to a town that no longer has anything to offer him and rekindling a friendship that’s long been left in the dust.   

“You don’t have to pretend to want to be around me,” Woojin says. He’s tired of walking on eggshells, so he’s going to crush them under his feet and walk freely from now on. “I know you’re nice, but it’s excessive, don’t you think?”

Chan looks uncomfortable, but unsurprised. “What do you mean?”

“Even if neither of us have said anything, things aren’t the same as they were two years ago,” Woojin says, grabbing two pairs of chopsticks from the box in the center of the table that stores them, and he passes one pair to Chan after wiping the tips down with a clean napkin. Then he does the same to his own chopsticks, before he sets them down to the side of his plate.

 _Things aren’t the same_ is an understatement, when Woojin and Chan had gone from late night chats and practically breathing in each other’s personal space to barely talking for months at a time. They’re two strangers who shared a past but won’t share a future, because it’s too late to go back to the point in time where their paths diverged and there’s no use in trying to change anything. Woojin sighs, but he forces his next words to come out lightheartedly. “Aren’t you tired of being on your best behavior all the time?”

“Best behavior? What does that— I still _like_ you, Woojin,” Chan says, upset, and Woojin’s stomach twists itself into ten thousand knots at what Chan means and doesn’t mean. “Me moving out of the shelter wasn’t me throwing away our friendship.”

“I don’t know about that,” Woojin says. “Friends tell each other more than a week in advance if one of them is making a life-altering decision and moving to a completely different city, right?” He shoves a piece of chicken into his mouth.

“Woojin…”

“I’m not some random classmate you became friends with in high school, Chan,” Woojin says, once he’s chewed and swallowed the food in his mouth. He looks down and not at the man sitting across from him, because he doesn’t want Chan to see his face and how blatantly the hurt is written all over it. “We’ve been friends since we were six, when we had nobody else but each other.”

“I’m sorry,” Chan says, earnestly. “Really.”  

“I wouldn’t have been mad at you for moving away,” Woojin says. “I know I wasn’t…as expressive in high school, and I had a few rough patches, but I would have been happy for you. I’ve always known how much you love music. I wouldn’t have held you back or anything.”

Woojin doesn’t reply to any of Chan’s texts or messages on kakaotalk, but he has a whole folder of bookmarks on his internet browser, dedicated to articles about the songs Chan makes or Chan himself. He buys all of the songs that Chan’s been involved in producing, even if he doesn’t talk about it.  

“I know that,” Chan says. “I don’t have any excuses. There was so much going on with me, that I was trying to figure out. I wanted space to grow as an individual, and—”

Woojin sucks in his cheeks, and doesn’t think about how that “space” that Chan had wanted so desperately, might have been because Woojin’s presence was suffocating him.

“You threw me away,” he finally says, knowing full well that the phrase comes off more petulant than serious. He gathers the courage to look up at Chan, whose face is so solemn, and so _lost_. Woojin’s felt kind of lost, too, in more ways than one for a long, long time. He inhales shakily. “You threw me away, when you realized you no longer needed me.”

He thinks of long nights curled up next to puppy and kitten hybrids who were too scared to sleep by themselves, and the way he’d watched over Chan for years in the exact same way, until Chan outgrew his life at the shelter and outgrew Kim Woojin holding onto his hand.

“That’s not true,” Chan says. “Even if I don’t…say that, out loud, I do. I do need you.”

It sucks, that Woojin is never going to say no to Chan, because his resiliency is like that of a child who keeps searching for their parents’ love their whole life, even when the parents have long disappeared and stopped giving it.

“Then you can’t half-ass it, Chan. It’s either all or nothing, and despite how long we’ve been together and how well we know each other, I can live just fine without you. I’ve been doing it for years.”

He thinks of high school lunches spent in the library, hustled over textbooks with his track teammates instead of hanging around on the rooftop with Chan. He thinks about learning, painstakingly, to cook from the internet and old cookbooks they had lying around, because Chan had upped and disappeared as he pleased, and Woojin had ended up with one less friend and four hungry, growing puppy boys to take care of on his own. He thinks about the same small road he and Chan would always take to get to their favorite family restaurant when they were coming home from school, because it was the only place they could only afford to eat at as teenagers, and how it had went out of business only weeks after Chan left Daejeon.

Since high school, Woojin has tried to hold on to every piece of Chan he possibly can, but they’ve slipped in between his fingers and out of his hands no matter how hard he’s tried to contain them, and now all he has in his hands is a few brittle pieces of someone he used to consider the other half of himself.

“I want everything,” Chan replies, and Woojin closes his eyes. _Everything_ is a lot to ask for,  but Woojin can give the _everything_ that Chan has in mind. “I won’t half-ass it this time around, Woojin.”

“Okay,” Woojin says.      

Chan laughs a little, in disbelief, as they go back to eating calmly. “Why did we fight while eating dakgalbi?”

“Because you’re a shitty friend,” Woojin replies. “And because it’s weird to just peacefully eat across from someone you want to punch in the face.”   

“I’d argue that I’m not, but I kind of am, I guess,” Chan admits, sounding sheepish. “Will you be my friend anyway, even if you want to punch me in the face?” His smile is so hopeful and bright, and Woojin is torn between the option of smiling back and the option of shoving chicken into Chan’s mouth to shut him up.

“I’ll think about it, and get back to you two years from now,” Woojin says, instead, and laughs as Chan sends him a withering look over a mouthful of tteok and cheese, his shoulders feeling lighter than they have in months.

 

✤

 

The idea of transitioning into middle school had been scary, because instead of having just a teacher for the whole day, there were many teachers for all the different classes students were supposed to take, and Woojin hadn’t known if that change would affect the amount of time he and Chan could spend together.

“What if we’re not in any of each other’s classes?” Woojin had asked the shelter director, and she’d briefly smiled at him, while a ferret hybrid was wrapping his little arms around her neck, asking for more hugs.

“Has that ever stopped you before?” she’d asked. She’d been puzzled, every single year before this one, as to how Woojin and Chan were still such tight knit friends, when Woojin was so loud and outgoing and Chan…wasn’t, but maybe it had been because Woojin and Chan, with all of their differences and seemingly opposite personality traits, balanced each other out and filled in each other’s cracks. Chan listened patiently and payed attention to everything Woojin said, but whenever he _did_ have something to say, Woojin would wait for him, staying quiet until Chan could properly convey his thoughts.       

“I guess not,” Woojin had said, nodding thoughtfully. “Chan’s my favorite person.”

“I know, Woojin,” she’d said, and Woojin had scampered off to find Chan, worries resolved for the time being.      

 

✤

 

Chan bumps Woojin on the hip in lieu of a normal greeting, and Woojin stumbles slightly to the right as Chan pulls a drawer open to look for a specific eating utensil. He’s wearing a fitted shirt that doesn’t conceal much, the muscles in his arm shifting, slightly, while he remains unaware of Woojin’s eyes on him. Despite summer having just ended, he seems to have gotten even paler than the last time he visited. Not that Woojin’s actively keeping tabs on it.

“I can cook, the rest of this week? Or all the time, while I’m here,” Chan offers, the clinking of stainless steel spoons and forks stopping as he looks up at Woojin. “You must be tired of it.” 

Woojin gives him a doubtful look.

“What do you mean by that?” Chan asks, holding a hand to his chest like he’s offended. His lips are twitching and his dimples are showing, though, so Woojin knows he’s just messing around. 

“Nothing,” Woojin replies. “I’m fine with that, if you’re up to it.”

“I am,” Chan says. He finally pulls out a spoon, in triumphant victory, which Woojin can feel radiating off of him just by glancing at Chan out of the corner of his eye. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll make it for you.”

“What if I wanted black truffles from France?” Woojin teases. “Would you get that for me?”

“I _meant_ , whatever you were going to make this week, if you’ve got it planned out already,” Chan revises hastily. “Do you always have to give me such a hard time?”

“I am simply letting you embark on new challenges,” Woojin says. He watches Chan open the fridge, rearranging the various items and containers in there until he finds what he’s looking for and pulls out a small tub of yogurt. “Perhaps a trip to France would make you a better chef _and_ composer.”

“Maybe.” Something in Chan’s face shifts, and Woojin has been suspecting, for a while, that something isn’t quite right. Chan’s noisy whenever the kids are around and sings silly songs when he’s showering or getting ready in the bathroom, but his under-eyes are always dark, and he never really gives any real details when Seungmin or Jeongin ask him to tell them about his job.  

It feels like Chan’s vacation isn’t so much a vacation as it is a break away from something that’s deeply stressing him out back in Seoul. That’s why he sleeps with his jaws tense and eyebrows furrowed, whenever Woojin happens to discover him in an unconscious state, because Chan doesn’t seem to let himself sleep much at all unless he’s randomly fallen into it. On certain days, he goes to bed later than Woojin and still wakes up earlier, even if he doesn’t always get up right away, and some nights Woojin will wake up at random hours of the morning to Chan blankly staring a hole through his laptop, like there’s a problem in there he’s given up on trying to solve.   

During the day though, his laptop is always closed, and the music keyboard that he connects to his composing software hasn’t been moved from its spot on the shelf in the corner of their room for nearly a whole week.

“Why are you staying this long in Daejeon, this time around?” Woojin asks. He turns on the faucet and grabs the cleaning sponge next to it, pumping some dish soap onto the scratchy, green side of it.

“I’m on vacation,” Chan says, airily, but his voice sounds uncertain all the same. “Remember?”

“You could be on vacation in Seoul and just not go to work,” Woojin says.

“I can’t relax in Seoul,” Chan says. He leans against the counter. A soft, plastic pop sounds as the lid comes off the yogurt tub. “Being stuck in my apartment and the way everything is so close together there sometimes makes me feel…trapped.”

Woojin pushes the knob of the faucet controls back a little so that the water flow isn’t so strong. “…Trapped?”

“Yeah,” Chan says. “I can’t get out of my own headspace.” 

“And you can get out of your headspace here?”

“Yeah, I think,” Chan says, and Woojin doesn’t have to look at Chan to know neither of them truly believe that.

He’s about to ask about Chan’s irregular sleeping patterns, but the store front bell rings to indicate someone has come in. Woojin quickly rinses the current plate he’s washing and puts it in the drying rack before wiping his hands dry on a towel and going into the common area.

A woman stands by the front desk, looking around the room. She’s not very tall, but she’s dressed in a work suit that’s completely wrinkle free and wearing heels with pointed toes. Her large, round sunglasses cover most of her face, but all Woojin notices is the thin line of her mouth as she frowns at everything. 

“Welcome,” Woojin says carefully. “How may I help you?”

She lowers her sunglasses to look at him, giving him a frosty once-over before speaking. “Are you in charge around here?” she asks, in an impatient sort of way, and Woojin blinks a few times, gathering his composure before he answers her question.

Working with strangers who are interested in adopting animal hybrids has always entailed being able to deal with a whole range of personality types, from very agreeable people to the ones who are rude and uncooperative despite seeking out services they can’t find elsewhere, but it’s been a while since Woojin has met someone as abrasive and unfriendly as the woman standing in front him.

“Yes, for the most part,” Woojin replies. He has to hold back from rolling his eyes, and he pastes on a customer service smile in order to gain trust that he doesn’t particularly want. “I can deal with any requests or conflicts you have regarding business with our shelter.”

“Alright. Can I request to look at the available animal hybrids you have?” the woman asks, shedding her glasses completely and putting them into her purse. Her eyes are large and unfriendly as she waits for Woojin to reply.

“Sure,” Woojin says. “I can bring you over, they’re just in the other part of this building. Have you looked online before at the profiles we have for the ones available?” The shelter has online profiles of the children who are available for adoption, with their photos in their best outfits and their basic information written underneath along with their interests and hobbies.

“No,” she says. “You have a website?”

“We do,” Woojin says, then: “Please follow me.”

She doesn’t say anything, just follows after him through the hallway to travel to the other side of the building. Her heels clicking are the only thing Woojin can hear behind him, and he can feel her judgment digging claws into his back.

Most of the young animal hybrid children look up when Woojin opens the door, their initial smiles replaced by curious, nervous looks once they realize a stranger has come in to look at them. “Since we treat the animal hybrids as we would human children at an orphanage, we ask potential foster parents to treat the children here as they would any regular child,” Woojin says, tongue at the roof of his mouth as he watches the woman walk around the room, scanning the various hybrids with cold scrutiny.

She doesn’t look like she’s here for the right reasons, but she hasn’t actually done anything questionable so Woojin has no reason to ask her to leave, yet.

“Do you have any hybrids that are of a rare species?” she asks, turning around to face Woojin when she’s finished circling the room. She doesn’t look impressed. The animal children feel nervous with her around, and Woojin can sense it in the way they continue to play while keeping their eyes on the strange woman, their tails still and ears slightly down.

“We rescue animal hybrids who have been abandoned in the Daejeon area and surrounding it,” Woojin says. “We don’t look to collect certain breeds over another. Do you have a particular type you’re interested in? If so, I can keep tabs on it in case an animal hybrid in that category comes in and I can contact you.”      

“I’m getting an animal hybrid for someone as a gift,” the woman says. “She likes collecting them, and it’s her birthday soon, so I’m trying to find her something special.”

“Why don’t we move outside, if none of the hybrids have caught your eye yet,” Woojin suggests, because he doesn’t want any of the hybrid children to hear the way the woman is referring to them as if they’re inanimate objects. _Something special._ Just hearing it leaves a bitter aftertaste in Woojin’s mouth.

“Um,” Woojin says, sucking in his upper lip for a bit before releasing it. “While we support and appreciate everyone who comes in with an interest in adopting, we discourage spontaneously adopting an animal hybrid to give away as a gift because of the emotional insecurity that it often causes the child.”

“The child?” the woman repeats, sounding confused.   

“The animal hybrid,” Woojin clarifies, annoyed. She probably won’t understand unless he refers to them as _it._ He takes a deep breath.

“What’s wrong with giving them away as a gift?” she asks. “Isn’t it enough that we get them off your hands?”

Woojin wonders what it’s like, to have so much entitlement and privilege and wealth, that you can care so little about the emotional trauma of animal children who have sometimes been abandoned not just once or twice, but multiple times. He remembers countless times where animal children were overjoyed at finally being adopted, only to be returned after the holiday season because animal children weren’t as easy to care for as small cats or dogs. He can’t possibly expect newcomers to be educated on how to treat the hybrids correctly, but they’re usually not this unceremonious either.

“I’ll have to correct you on that,” he says, and she raises an eyebrow. “Animal hybrids are much more high maintenance than full animals because they’re part human, and we aim to help them lead lives in society where they are not seen as pets, but as children and eventually, adults who coexist with humans in society. The hybrids who are adopted randomly and without any thought are often abandoned because the gift receiver did not expect to essentially raise a child, and that causes additional damage on top of what the hybrid has already suffered through.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to be choosy,” she says, her chin out. Woojin can feel his jaw tensing. “I’ve heard that the Daejeon adoption rates aren’t doing as well as the ones in other cities. Shouldn’t you just worry about making money instead of preaching morals to people older than you? I’ll pay you more to make it quick if I can find a hybrid that appeals to me. You must have more than the ones in that room?”

“If you know enough about us to know the statistics in our adoption rates, then you should also know the population differences in Daejeon versus Seoul, and that our organization prioritizes finding forever homes for the children rather than getting a certain number out every month just so we can make money,” Woojin says, smiling with forced politeness. “If you’re so affronted with the hybrids I’ve shown you, why don’t you travel to Seoul? We are in extremely close touch with that branch and I know their selection is much larger, so you might be more likely to find a hybrid that suits your taste there.” It feels like all of the blood in his veins is boiling, and he clenches his teeth harder.

Gentle hands land on Woojin’s shoulder, and when he turns to look at who it is, Chan is standing next to him. “Sorry, is there a problem?” Chan asks.

The woman gives Chan a cursory glance out of the side of her eye. “Do you also work here? I demand to see all of the available hybrids you have. I was told that this location has a good selection, but I am unimpressed by any of the ones I saw in that showroom, and your coworker is refusing to show me anything because of the fact that I am planning on getting an animal hybrid as a gift for someone.”

“Wow—” Woojin says, temper flaring up, and Chan squeezes his shoulder as a signal for him to keep calm.

“If that’s all my coworker showed you, I’m afraid that’s all we have to offer,” Chan says. “We would not purposely hide certain hybrids when our goal is to help the hybrids get adopted.”

“Where is your boss?” the woman says. “I want to speak to him. Surely he would not approve of your behavior towards a potential customer.”

Woojin’s last two brain cells are on fire. He wants to punch the woman in the face and send her pricey designer bag flying.

“Unfortunately, _she_ isn’t here today,” Chan says, voice dripping in false pity. At least one of them is still calm enough to hold a conversation because Woojin is numb all over his body except for his fists. “My coworker is the only ‘boss’ you’ll be able to see today. We also have the right to refuse service to those who are causing trouble for the business, if you didn’t already see the sign in the front desk area.”

“You—”

Chan cuts her off before she finishes. “We also have a security team upstairs we reach out to when our workers are in danger of being attacked for things they can’t control. Would you like me to contact them so that they can escort you on your way out?”

The woman stares long and hard at both of them, before eventually putting her sunglasses back on forcefully and storming out of the hallway. She attempts to slam the front door, but the door to the shelter is designed to close slowly and never slam, and all Woojin hears is the bell ringing a soft goodbye to her as she swears loudly and walks away.   

After a few minutes of them just standing in silence, Chan asks Woojin, “You okay? What was her deal?”

“I don’t know,” Woojin says. “We sometimes get customers that are difficult, but I’ve never had to deal with someone who so blatantly saw the hybrids as objects to show off. When did you even come?”

“I didn’t like her energy, so I followed you a few minutes afterward to see if you wanted company to split the negative energy she was radiating,” Chan says with a chuckle. “It was worse than I expected. You were about to knock her teeth out.”

“I _hate_ people like that,” Woojin says, finally releasing the sigh of frustration that he’s been repressing since the woman came in. “They’re the reason why animal hybrids have so many trust and abandonment issues. All because of their selfishness! You can’t adopt a _child_ to give someone as a gift just because it has furry ears and a tail. You shouldn’t do that with regular animals either, but obviously I’m just _overreacting_ because people do that kind of stuff all the time.”

“You’re not overreacting. It’s because you love and care about the hybrids. You don’t want them to have caretakers who make their lives worse than if they had just stayed here,” Chan says comfortingly. “You shouldn’t let someone like her ruin your day.”   

“…You threatened to call security on her,” Woojin says, with a weak laugh of disbelief when he thinks over what Chan had said to prevent the situation from escalating. “We don’t _have_ security.”

“Uh, _I’m_ the security,” Chan states, after a beat of silence like it’s completely obvious, and Woojin bursts into laughter. “If some old bitch is going to come and start random fights in peaceful places where innocent children are living, you best believe I’m going to teach her a lesson. I was going to leave the room and come back in a different outfit, then beat her up.”

Imagining it sets Woojin’s laughter off again, and when he eventually gets the last of his giggles out of his system, he sighs. “What difference would that have made? Hitting doesn’t solve any problems in the end, whether it’s me or you.”

Chan says, “It does make a difference. If I had hit her and had the last interaction with her, it would have just been me getting into trouble. I could have pretended to be a particularly self-righteous visitor but if it was you…well. You live here, and you love the hybrids more than anything, so I didn’t want you to get in any sort of trouble because of someone insignificant.”   

“That’s really…” Woojin says. _Touching,_ he thinks. He feels numb again, but in a different way than before. “Wonderful of you, but stupid. Don’t fight old batty women over stupid shit.”

A squawk of protest escapes Chan, and he argues, “ _You_ were going to do the same thing!”

“I wasn’t actually going to hit her,” Woojin says, and Chan exhales loudly, not believing him at all. “I think I would have been able to keep my cool.”

“You already had steam coming out of your head when I walked in,” Chan says. “I think she was about to get her ass handed to her.”   

“She would have deserved it,” Woojin says, crossing his arms. “People who think animal hybrids are products and trophies are trash.” He sighs. “I’m going to go check up on the hybrids.”

They go back in to comfort the animal hybrids, who are still uncomfortable at first but easily forget about the strange woman once Chan and Woojin start to play with them, and they take turns lifting the children in the air like planes and flying them around the room for the rest of the hour.

 

✤

 

All throughout primary school, Chan had been small and thin, and it didn’t help that his head was full of wild, brown curls that didn’t resemble the straight, jet black hair all the other kids had. It would have been easy for him to become a target of bullying, because while kids could be pure, they could be unintentionally cruel, too, poking hardest at the things they couldn’t understand.

Woojin had been around, though, and as a kid, he’d been thick in build, and tall enough that most of the kids wouldn’t start a fight with him if they could help it. He’d been loud and outspoken, never hesitating to pipe up when he saw something unfair happen or someone getting picked on, so all of the kids in their year had known not to mess around, especially not with Chan.

It had been in his core nature to protect the person he cherished most, and Woojin had always thought that he’d forever be the armor that barred Chan from all the things in the world that might hurt or scare him. Too young and simpleminded, the Woojin from back then had never realized that hurtful things aren’t always tangible, and that he’d grow up too afraid to surge forward with the same amount of courage as his ten year old self, letting fear and unspoken feelings pool from puddles into an ocean that was too wide to cross even if he wanted to. 

Even if he changes his mind, even if he gathers the courage…what are the chances, if Woojin overcame his fear and swam through that too-wide, too-deep ocean, that Chan would even be waiting on the other side?

Chan is all grown up now, with a back that’s filled out and shoulders that have widened, and even if he’s a little shorter than Woojin, it doesn’t diminish the impact of his presence a bit. He has a life that Woojin’s only present in twenty five days out of an entire year, give or take, and he doesn’t need Woojin to be his armor anymore. That revelation, whenever Woojin remembers it and lets it sink in, is what hurts most of all.

 

✤

 

Chan had stopped letting Woojin touch him when they turned fifteen years old.

He had shied away from Woojin’s straying hands, then gotten angry when Woojin had wanted to reach out and touch again for confirmation. “What’s wrong?” Woojin had asked. There’d been a weird distance between them, and three feet had felt like thirty miles because all Chan had been doing lately was telling Woojin to stop coming so close to him. 

“We’re not kids anymore,” Chan had said, and Woojin had felt…awful, like his heart was turning from warm, beating flesh into an organ made of paper thin ice.

“Oh,” Woojin had replied, and chuckled uncomfortably. Kingdoms are broken apart and destroyed by long, hard battles fought in the dead of winter, but four measly words had been all it took to break Woojin’s heart into a thousand sharp fragments.

In appropriate teenage coping fashion, Woojin had thrown himself into the extracurriculars that he _didn’t_ share with Chan, because zero best friends were better than half a best friend, and he didn’t want to watch Chan drift away from him and get close to somebody else. Minho had been thrilled that Woojin was starting to stay longer after track practice, completely unaware of the reason behind it.  

“You’ve been sad, lately, hyung,” Hyunjin had said one day, head resting in Woojin’s lap because he’d managed to squeeze Felix out of the spot. His tail had thumped against the ground lazily, casually, but his eyes were carefully scanning for any clues in Woojin’s face. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” Woojin had said, because it hadn’t been like the world was ending. People grew apart all the time. He’d just never prepared for it to happen to him, with Chan. They were supposed to be together forever, but maybe that only happened in fairy tales, where the logistics of real life didn’t apply and every princess magically managed to find her perfect prince. “Don’t worry about it.”

And for a little while, Woojin had thought he could get everything under control.

But then he’d skipped a couple classes and started getting into fights. His teachers had been bewildered, completely at a loss for how to handle him when he’d had no history of causing problems before. They probably didn’t teach teachers at the training schools how to deal with students who suddenly cracked, because in everyone’s minds, good students stayed good, and shitty students kept falling to the bottom until there was no future left for them. Schools took credit when students were doing well, but they expressed confusion when the opposite happened, pointing fingers at those who weren’t following the pattern of success they’d been set out on.

Woojin had been angry. At himself, at Chan, at the whole world. He’d just been waiting for the storm to pass, because as difficult a pill abandonment was to swallow, Woojin had started off with nothing and nobody in the beginning of his life. It wasn’t a completely foreign feeling—it was just that he’d gotten too used to having someone by his side all the time, and he’d been too foolish to prepare himself for days where he might be living in solitude again.

He hadn’t had any shoulders to cry on, or any ears to listen to him talk about all of the worst fears he’d ever felt coming true. That kind of comfort had always been given by Chan, before, until he’d decided that he didn’t want Woojin around the same way Woojin wanted him. 

Eventually, Chan had called him out to the rooftop to talk.

“What are you, a delinquent now?” Chan had asked. The teachers had probably sent him, thinking that Chan would be able to knock some sense into Woojin. “What’s wrong with you?” He’d rested his forearms over the railing that protected people from slipping and falling, and Woojin had rested his back on it, kicking at a loose pebble on the dark green ground.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Woojin had said. “I’m just tired.”

“Something has to be wrong,” Chan had said, and Woojin had considered, momentarily, telling Chan that he was losing his favorite person and he couldn’t do anything about it. That he’d spent his whole life looking for a sense of belonging and piecing together what _home_ meant, because the few memories of his parents before they’d passed had never given him any real answers. That he’d always understood he couldn’t be selfish about the love he received from the shelter director, because she had a million other things to worry about, and so, so many animal hybrids to rescue and give love to. That for years, Woojin had put the feeling of _home_ into Chan, who’d always listened to him chatter away about all of his passing thoughts and had grown not only alongside Woojin, but also into Woojin, so deeply that it was ripping him apart to acknowledge the emotional distance rapidly growing between them.

“Think about the younger kids. You’re the oldest one at the shelter. They all look up to you,” Chan had added, and Woojin’s temper had gotten the better of him, for once. 

He’d snapped back at Chan, “If you’re so concerned, why don’t you take over as the role model of the household?”

“Woojin…”

“We’re not kids anymore,” Woojin had said, looking Chan in the eye as he echoed Chan’s words from months earlier. “You don’t get to tell me what to do, anymore.” 

Chan had looked taken aback at the sharpness of Woojin’s voice, but he’d quickly schooled his face into something more neutral. “Fine,” he’d said, “Just know that I’m here. If you need me to be.” 

“Whatever,” Woojin had mumbled, and he’d taken the stairs to go back to class. 

 

✤

 

“Oh,” Woojin says to himself, when he comes home late and hears some movement coming from the dining room. There’s a light on, so someone’s definitely in there. He tucks his sneakers in the corner properly before slipping his feet into his usual pair of slippers that he wears to walk around when he’s in the shelter.

Minho had been unimpressed at dinner, when Woojin told him about his and Chan’s new attempts at doing their friendship right.

“He’s a punk, and he’s always going to be a punk,” Minho had said with drunken fury, a bottle of soju diluting the concentration of all his usual naggy behavior as well as the intensity of his irritation. “You’re still _my_ friend, no matter what Mr. Curly Fries Hair says or does to win you back over.” 

“Of course,” Woojin had replied, laughing at the insult and the way Minho put extra emphasis on the word _my,_ as if each person in the world was only allowed one friend at a time, no more.    

A quick look into the dining room reveals Hyunjin to be the one at the dining table. He’s flipping through a textbook impatiently, chewing on the end of his pencil as he scans for something. “Hyunjinnie,” Woojin says.

“Hi Woojin hyung,” Hyunjin says, smiling as he looks up. He takes the pencil out of his mouth and twirls it absentmindedly. “Did you go somewhere?”

“I did,” Woojin replies, putting on a secretive smile to tease Hyunjin.

Hyunjin tilts his head. The angle makes one of his ears flop down adorably, and Woojin resists the urge to take his phone out and snap a quick shot. “Was it a date?”

“No,” Woojin says. “I’m not nearly that spicy, Hyunjinnie.”

“You wouldn’t tell me if it was a date, anyways,” Hyunjin says, pouting.

Woojin laughs. “I went to get dinner with Minho, and then I made sure his drunk ass got home.”

“Oh,” Hyunjin says. “I see.”

“Where’s Chan?”

“Thanks hyung, I’m good too. How are you?” Hyunjin says, in a tone of voice that borders between bitter and amused, and Woojin scratches at the side of his neck sheepishly.

“Sorry,” Woojin says. “I’d love to talk with you longer, but I figured you were busy studying and didn’t have the time to spare.” 

“It’s fine,” Hyunjin says, voice lilting in a way that means he’s over it. “Chan hyung’s in bed or something. I peeked in there a while ago, and he was asleep.”  

“Okay,” Woojin says, and he’s about to leave and let Hyunjin go back to studying, when Hyunjin speaks again.

“Hyung, what if I don’t get in anywhere?” he asks, sighing as he runs both of his hands through his hair in frustration, being careful as to avoid messing up the direction of the fur around his ears. “I don’t know if I’m going to end up being anything or anyone important in life, anyways.”

With Daejeon being home to a plethora of tech companies and the research institute KAIST, students in this area, human and hybrid alike, are expected to pursue “strong academic” careers. The pressure hadn’t been so stifling when Woojin was in his last year of high school, because he’d known he wasn’t going to major in anything that required an extensive knowledge of math or science, and Chan had been more preoccupied with making music and looking for a future in the entertainment industry than putting his whole life into entrance exams.

It’s different for Hyunjin, who’s brilliant at all of his subjects even if he doesn’t openly talk about his studies. Woojin can see it in his eyes, and the way the younger boy’s irises fill with light whenever he finally cracks open a difficult concept in one of his subjects, filling page after page of scrap paper with practice problems that he’ll repeatedly solve until he can pretty much do them in his sleep. The other boys often go to him for questions they need answered, huddling together in large, adorable puppy piles with their textbooks and notes laid out as Hyunjin patiently explains everything they don’t understand.

“‘Important’ isn’t some destination you have to reach. You were important from the moment you were born, Hyunjinnie, and it’s enough for you to just try your very best on your exams,” Woojin says, pulling out a chair at the table and sitting down. “Your worth as a living being isn’t measured by the university you end up going to.”

“It’s so weird, that you always know the exact words to make me feel better. If I were in your position, I wouldn’t even know what to say to myself,” Hyunjin says. “It’s hard, being around my friends, when everyone’s stressed about college and studying. No one has time to be kind to each other anymore.”

“Do any of the kids at school give you a hard time?” Woojin says. He’s been occasionally called to the school office at the local elementary school, in instances of hybrid children from the shelter running into problems with the human kids during playtime. He’s not sure how it is for animal hybrids in high school, since Hyunjin, Felix, and Seungmin are the first teenage hybrids the shelter’s ever kept due to the fact that they didn’t want to leave Daejeon, or Woojin, to be more specific. All of the other teenage hybrids that had ever lived at the shelter were fine with being transferred to other branches of the shelter organization such as the Seoul branch, where they would have a larger chance of being adopted.     

“Not really,” Hyunjin says with a shrug. “Felix and Seungmin and I are a group in our grade, and I don’t really pay attention to the people who say weird things about us because I don’t have time for that.”

“Good,” Woojin says. “And Jeongin?”

“I think he’s doing really good,” Hyunjin says, licking his lips as he looks upwards, thinking. “He’s always laughing with the same two friends, I think, and he’s never said anything to me about having a hard time.”

“I see. I’m glad.” Woojin feels his phone vibrate in his pocket, and when he takes it out to check who’s messaged him, it’s just Minho, sending a flurry of heart emojis and drunk declarations about how much he loves Woojin and how he’s _definitely_ not going to give him away to Mr. Curly Fries Hair. He slides his phone onto the table, flipping it so that he can’t see the screen get flooded with notifications. “Want me to make you snacks?”

“I am going to gain weight,” Hyunjin says, even as his tail twitches in interest. 

“Puppies are cuter when they’re a little rounder,” Woojin teases, and Hyunjin scrunches up his nose in response.  

“I’m a grown ass puppy,” he says, petulantly, and he’s not wrong. Hyunjin pays attention to what he wears, now, and is careful to only blow dry his hair in the direction that makes it look best once it’s dry. According to Felix, Hyunjin receives a lot of confession letters, even if he’s more interested in studying and sports than dating.

“I know, and yet, you’re still a baby to me,” Woojin replies, smiling, “I’ll just cut you some fruit, then.” After Hyunjin nods in agreement, Woojin leans across the corner of the dining table and tousles his hair affectionately. “When was the last time you washed your hair, kid?”

“You’re mean, hyung,” Hyunjin says, patting at his hair and looking at his fingertips to check how much grease there is. “I am trying to get into college. Hair washing isn’t a top priority.”

“You’ve gotta take a break sometimes,” Woojin says. He gets out of his chair, and walks over to the sink to wash his hands. “Your brain’s going to explode if you keep trying to shove information inside of it 24/7.”

Hyunjin chokes out a high pitched, strangled laugh. “Yeah, but _you_ never take—”

“No personal attacks allowed,” Woojin says, cutting off the retort he knows he’s going to get if he doesn’t interrupt Hyunjin right away. He looks for a peeler in the top drawer next to the stove, and retrieves two apples from the fridge and a cutting board from the dishwasher.

While Woojin maneuvers the peeler around the curves and bumps of the apples, Hyunjin watches lazily, resting his chin on his forearms.

“You can go back to studying,” Woojin says. “I am just here to serve you fruits, and then I’ll let you study.”

Hyunjin pushes his textbook away. “I’m glad that I was brought to this shelter, because I got to meet you and Chan hyung, and all of the other nice people that took care of us,” Hyunjin says. “Before I came here, it was…hard.”

Hyunjin’s never talked about his past before the shelter, and Woojin’s never tried to pry it out of him, because it can be traumatic for animal hybrids to recall events from early childhood if they’ve already blocked out most of the memories. The only one that knows firsthand what the animal children are going through is the shelter director, since she’s led a large portion of the rescue missions in Daejeon and surrounding areas, but she’s never revealed anything about the conditions she found Hyunjin in. 

“And now, it’s…?”

“It’s more than I thought I would ever get,” Hyunjin says. His voice is quiet, but Woojin is listening. “Things are hard because I’m lucky enough to have an education and apply for university, but back then, it was…I was always afraid.” He pauses, sucking in a breath. “I’m just really happy that this is where I ended up.”

“No regrets about not transferring?” Woojin has finished cutting up the apples in bite sized chunks, pushing them together into a semi-neat pile, and he tosses the centers and peels in the trash.

The Seoul branch’s adoption rates for teenage animal hybrids are much higher compared to the adoption rates for their little shelter in Dunsan-dong, due to the massive gap in population sizes. Jihyo, an older rabbit hybrid who had been at their shelter until she was fourteen, had been adopted almost as soon as she was transferred to the Seoul branch.  

“Never,” Hyunjin says. He shoves a large piece of apple into his mouth, and continues talking. “Being adopted as a teenager would be weird, you know? My personality’s all fleshed out, so what good is it to suddenly have parents who are strangers when I already have you and Chan?”

“Finish chewing before you talk,” Woojin says, an inexplicable warmth flooding into his chest. “There are plenty of teenage hybrids who’d love to be adopted even when they’re that old, but I’m glad you stayed here. You mean so much to me, my smart, oversized puppy.”

“Cheesy~” Hyunjin says, like they haven’t spent the last few minutes having a sappy heart to heart, and Woojin pinches him on the thigh. The whiny yelp that follows right after Woojin’s fingers twist into Hyunjin’s skin is so, so satisfying.  

 

✤

 

Having Chan around, _fully_ around in the way that he hovers and lingers whenever Woojin’s doing anything in the shelter now is strange, because all the other times he’d visited home, he’d paid more attention to the other boys they grew up with, taking Felix and Hyunjin out for movies or Seungmin and Jeongin on late night snack runs. He’d never…wanted to be around Woojin for longer than necessary, and they’d been civil to each other, but hadn’t spent enough time together to decide if there was anything left to hash out under all the polite manners and small talk.

When Chan had moved out, Woojin had felt a lot like a jigsaw puzzle that was missing a bunch of pieces, easily torn apart because of all the empty spaces and missing links. But now…now his jigsaw puzzle feels complete, even if it’s just for a little bit, because while Chan still takes the high schoolers out for movies and quick bouts of fun, he also drinks coffee next to Woojin without leaving any space between their shoulders and heats up leftovers if he thinks Woojin will come home from errands feeling hungry. Woojin had thought it would be harder for them to go back to old habits with each other because they decided to do so through a mutual agreement rather than a natural progression, but in reality, no amount of time spent apart will ever really erase the ease that comes every time they’re side by side.

Woojin feels scared, too, because good things don’t last no matter how secure they appear at first, and he’s dreading the wait for the bubble of happiness to pop once it’s done expanding to its fullest.  

 

✤

 

On a particularly cool evening, Chan comes into the bedroom he and Woojin share straight from the shower, with his hair wet and no shirt on. “In a rush to catch a cold?” Woojin asks, from the comfort of his own bed. He’s got his pillow propped up at an angle so his neck doesn’t get sore, and he’s scrolling through his Twitter feed, right foot precariously resting on his left knee. 

“I always forget to bring a clean shirt in, and by the time I realize, the water is already on,” Chan says, narrowing his eyes. His lips are pulled into a thin line, the Chan version of a pout. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“Too late, I’ve already done it,” Woojin replies, putting on a smug grin just to piss him off.   

Chan gives Woojin the side eye. “People don’t come in the evenings, anyways, if they’re really looking for animal hybrids to adopt. Customers at night aren’t customers, they’re troublemakers.”

“And then you’ll tell them about how you can call security, right? When this building isn’t even owned by a company and we’ve never hired any security teams,” Woojin says, smiling.

“You’re all nice and angelic in front of the kids, huh? But when it’s me, there’s only bullying and verbal insults,” Chan complains.

“I’ve gotta expel my mean energy somehow, if I spend all my time taking care of cute animal children,” Woojin says. “What better way to do it than picking on you?”

In reply, Chan only makes a soft _hmph,_ sticking his arms through the sleeves of a black cotton t-shirt before pulling his head through the neck hole. Woojin’s eyes, like a traitor, follow the motion of the fabric descending from the top of Chan’s back down to his hips, but Woojin looks back at his screen as soon as Chan’s face is free from the confines of his shirt.      

“You should…sleep more?” Woojin says. Chan’s sleeping patterns haven’t improved at all for the last few days. “I don’t see you resting a lot.”

Chan’s surprised from the sudden switch in attitude, and he licks his lips, thinking for a moment before he speaks. “I try to…I try to rest as much as I can? But it doesn’t always work out like I plan.” His laugh comes out wry.  

“Is it insomnia?”

“I guess,” Chan says. “The usual dose of stress, anxiety, what not.” When Woojin glances at Chan, the latter is looking at his MIDI keyboard, still on the shelf where he’d left it alone after the first week in Daejeon. At this rate, it’s going to start gathering dust.   

“That’s worrying,” Woojin says, and in a more authoritative tone: “You should stop drinking coffee, right?”

“Okay, _Mom_ ,” Chan says in mild annoyance. “I feel like garbage in the morning, though.”

Woojin hums, as though he’s thinking very hard. “Seeing as you _are_ garbage, though, that problem would require a more complex solution than just drinking coffee, don’t you think?”

Chan’s face is blank for a few seconds, and then all of his facial features scrunch hilariously as he processes what Woojin’s just said. “Fuck you,” he half yells, putting his hands on his hips. Woojin laughs until all of his stomach muscles feel like they’re cramping up.

Later, Chan crawls onto Woojin’s bed, despite his own being just a few feet away. He’s pulled on oversized gray sweatpants, and once he’s settled into as comfortable of a lying position as he can get, he uses his knee to knock Woojin’s foot, and the rest of Woojin, off balance.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Woojin asks, one hand letting go of his phone to lazily raise a fist at Chan.   

“You used to sing me lullabies to help me sleep, when we were younger,” Chan says. His hand covers Woojin’s, and he pushes, until Woojin relaxes his curled up fingers and resumes holding up his phone with both hands.

“Yeah,” Woojin says. “I remember.” Chan had suffered through a lot of nightmares, as a kid. Woojin hadn’t wanted to wake up the shelter director because she wasn’t any better at comforting Chan than he was, so he’d sing all sorts of songs to Chan until the younger boy fell back asleep.

“Can you do that?”

Woojin sucks on his lower lip thoughtfully. “…You mean you want me to sing for you, right now?”    

“Yes,” Chan says, with an adamant nod. “The whole shebang and everything.”

“What the heck does that even mean, you weirdo,” Woojin says, with a laugh.

“I _mean,_ bring out the guitars. Bring out the tambourines. Bring your whole back up vocal squad and a physical concert hall,” Chan answers. “Your most special guest is in the house~”

“More like intruder,” Woojin says, and whisper-shrieks in fear when aggressive fingers find and dig into his rib cage in retaliation. “Do you want to injure the performer before they’ve even started?”

“Your voice is so nice that a bruised rib won’t change anything,” Chan argues, honey sweet, and Woojin is momentarily distracted by the toothpaste he can smell on Chan’s breath.

Woojin puts down his phone so that he can get up and retrieve his guitar from the corner of the room. He usually doesn’t play because live instruments are always noisy, and it’s best to avoid making any unnecessary commotion when the younger hybrids are so excitable. 

“I sang to you a million times before,” Woojin says, even as he settles down into bed with the instrument. Chan must work with plenty of singers every day of his job, which makes it hard for Woojin not to feel self-conscious, because he’s no longer singing for a little boy that can’t sleep, but a man who judges and calls all the shots in the recording studio. He runs fingers across the frets on the guitar’s neck absentmindedly while he thinks about what song to sing.

“Sing to me a million and one times, then,” Chan replies. He’s curled into fetal position, with a corner of Woojin’s blanket covering his stomach and back.

Woojin doesn’t bother responding, just waits for his own breathing to even out, and starts singing.

 _Please don’t see…just a boy caught up in dreams and fantasies_  
_Please see me reaching out for someone I can’t see_  
_Take my hand let’s see where we wake up tomorrow_  
_Best laid plans sometimes are just a one night stand_  
_I’d be damned Cupid’s demanding back his arrow_  
_So let’s get drunk on our tears and…_

 _God, tell us the reason youth is wasted on the young_  
_It’s hunting season, and the lambs are on the run searching for meaning_  
_But are we all lost stars, trying to light up the dark?_

He pauses a little longer, uncertain, but Chan’s eyes are closed and he’s smiling, so Woojin continues.

 _I thought I saw you out there crying_  
_I thought I heard you call my name_  
_I thought I heard you out there crying_

_But are we all lost stars, trying to light up the dark?  
But are we all lost stars, trying to light up the dark…_

“Sing more,” Chan says, when Woojin finishes.

“Demanding,” Woojin says, and Chan shoves him in the thigh.

“I’m allowed to be demanding if I can’t sleep properly,” he replies, voice tinged with a bit of desperation, but then it disappears as soon as Woojin tries to listen more closely. “So accommodate me.”

“I’m not one of your fancy music artists,” Woojin says. His fingertips are warm, and red. The aftermath of strumming leaves a satisfying heat in his hand. “I don’t even play that often, anymore.”

“That’s fine,” Chan says. “Maybe just sing this one on loop for the next two hours, then.”  

Half an hour later, he realizes Chan hasn’t made any movement in a while, and once he finishes the last verse of his song for the sixth time, he slowly sets down his guitar against the wall next to his bed so that the noise of it touching the ground doesn’t disturb Chan.

“Channie?” he whispers, even though he can tell just from looking, that Chan’s actually fallen asleep.

While he waits for his favorite crime-related podcast to upload, Woojin plugs his earphones into his phone so that he won’t wake up Chan. He grabs the bright, floral blanket from Chan’s bed that he’d given Chan to sleep with, turns off the lights, and drapes the blanket over both his legs and Chan’s body. Chan’s body is laid diagonally across Woojin’s bed, making it hard for Woojin to arrange his own limbs comfortably, but Woojin makes it work by tucking in his knees to his chest and laying on his side, head tipped towards Chan’s. He turns the phone screen to the lowest possible brightness and hits play.

He doesn’t realize when he falls asleep, but he wakes up in the middle of the night, having been turned the right way to sleep and tucked in by Chan, presumably, who’s now lying in his own bed. His breathing is even and deep, and Woojin doesn’t think much of anything, just feels a deep contentedness in his chest as he lets fatigue pull him back into unconsciousness.    

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Out of all of the track meets Woojin’s ever participated in, there’s one that still stands out to him even after three years of leaving the team.

It’d been at INU in Incheon, where schools from many different cities’ and districts’ high schools were competing against each other for the season finals. It hadn’t been any of the races or individual athletes that left an impression on Woojin, but two women, looking to be in their early forties, talking together at the sidelines of the track.

“Did you hear about Mrs. Hwang’s son?” one woman had asked.  

“No,” the other woman replied. “What’s happened with her son?”  

“Jaehyun is…” the first woman had beckoned for the second to come in closer, but Woojin had been able to hear her from the turf, all the same, where he was rolling out his calf as part of his post-race routine. “Gay, apparently.”

“Really?”

Woojin had frowned, at the obvious disdain laced in the woman’s voice. He knew Jaehyun. The boy was in the same grade as him, handsome and smart and polite, and he’d never caused any trouble for the team. What did it matter, that he was gay as long as he was a good person and never hurt anyone? It was also none of their business, because Jaehyun’s life was his to live, not anyone else’s.   

“Yes,” the first woman had said. “I don’t even know how I’d sleep at night, if my son was gay.”

“Right,” the second woman had said, shaking her head. 

“He’d have been better off hiding it for the rest of his life. He won’t have a good future by telling the truth like that.”  

Woojin had felt sick to his stomach, like stones were being dropped one by one down his throat until there was no room left for air to come through into his lungs. Ten year old Woojin would have considered speaking up, because Jaehyun didn’t deserve to be talked about like that, but sixteen year old Woojin had frozen in place, terrified, as he wondered if what Jaehyun was going through was just a mirrored image of his own inclinations.

Maybe that was why Chan had been spending so much time with other people, lately. Maybe he’d noticed something was _wrong_ with Woojin, and he didn’t want to be friends anymore because of it.

Twenty minutes later, Minho had found Woojin in the same spot, staring listlessly into the distance, foam roller on the side. “You missed Jaehyun’s race, you know?”

The name had pulled Woojin from his trance. “…What?”

“Jaehyun PRed like crazy,” Minho had said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the finish line, where all of the competing athletes are hanging around and stretching. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it?”

“I did, I did.”

“Is something wrong? You seem kind of out of it,” Minho had asked, genuinely concerned, sitting down next to Woojin on the turf. The impact of his limbs hitting the ground had made little pieces of turf pellets fly up, and some of them had bounced off of Woojin’s leg.

While Minho had draped himself over Woojin’s stomach, smelling like a mixture of sweat and deodorant, Woojin had answered, “Not particularly,” and wondered what he and Minho, two teenage boys lying too close for comfort on top of each other, looked like under the scrutinizing gaze of adults.   

 

✤

 

“I’m going to watch a movie after we manage to feed the kids lunch and make them take their afternoon naps,” Woojin tells Chan. “Wanna join?”

Chan is stir-frying the vegetables and meat that he’s going to put in the spaghetti later. Woojin had helped him cut the onions and carrots earlier, but now he’s retreated to the dining table, peeling oranges for everyone to eat. “What are you watching?” Chan asks.

“The Babadook,” Woojin says. He places a freshly peeled orange on top of the other four he’s already removed from their outer skins.  

“Isn’t that a horror movie…?” Chan says. “No thanks.”

“It’s a great way to relieve stress,” Woojin says, in encouragement, and Chan stares at him incredulously.

“Watching people’s nightmares come true and blood splash around is a stress reliever for you?”  

“It’s not always bloody,” Woojin says. He gets an extremely doubtful look in return, and laughs, collecting all of the orange peels on the table and dumping them into the trash can. “When I watch horror movies, I think about my existence in the big picture, and the small things in life don’t bug me anymore because at least I’m not getting dragged into the basement by a demon.”

“That has got to be the most bizarre reason anyone’s ever given me for watching horror movies,” Chan says, shaking his head. He sniffs at a bundle of cilantro, and starts picking the leaves off of the stems carefully while Woojin works on breaking apart the carpels of the oranges, removing as much of the white skin that wasn’t pulled up during the peeling process as he can.  

“You probably haven’t run into many people who enjoy horror movies,” Woojin says. “Therefore, your sample population is insufficient for getting a wide enough range of perspectives to understand what horror has to offer people.”

Chan laughs at the sudden change in Woojin’s speaking pattern, and says, “You going to put it on the big screen?”

“Yeah,” Woojin says, and snorts as a new idea comes into mind. “Although, it might be interesting to watch you squirm and cry if we watch it on my laptop and you have to wear earphones.”

“Rude,” Chan says. “You can watch your creepy monster movies by yourself.”

He joins Woojin anyway, after the kitchen is all cleaned up and the last of the animal children have returned to their bedrooms, sleepy and full of spaghetti Bolognese and orange slices. “Move over,” Chan says, tapping Woojin’s leg, and with exaggerated difficulty, Woojin shifts over to the left so that Chan has space to sit on the couch.

“I’m already terrified,” Chan says, within the first thirty seconds of the film starting.

“This is going to be great,” Woojin says in response, completely unsympathetic. “You’re going to love it.”

Unexpectedly, Woojin falls asleep in the middle of the movie, when the main character discovers the creepy cursed storybook on her front door step. He’s usually able to keep paying attention to movies, but he’s watched _The Babadook_ enough times that it no longer really shocks him into staying super awake, and the combination of warm food and afternoon lethargy leaves his lids fluttering shut over and over again until they stop moving entirely.

When he wakes up, it’s to the sound of ending credit music and names flowing through the television screen. There’s muscled thigh under his ear and neck, and he shifts in discomfort without much thought before realizing that he’s gone from sitting next to Chan at the start of the movie to laying horizontally on his side, his head resting on Chan’s legs.  

“What—”  

He says it more out of confusion than anything else, but Chan leaps into an explanation before Woojin’s even made heads or tails of the situation. “You bend your neck at weird angles when you sleep sitting up, so I thought…this would be better?” His voice sounds weird, and Woojin opens one eye to look up at him. Chan’s face looks normal, but his ears are red and he’s staring ahead at the TV, and Woojin thinks…

Woojin closes his eyes, and doesn’t think about anything. He just hums in acknowledgment, because his head is dizzy from sleep and the light from the windows is too bright for his still sensitive eyes. He can feel Chan’s whole body relax at the fact that Woojin hasn’t made a big deal about whatever this is. “What time is it?”

“Almost four,” Chan answers. “I would never have believed that there are people who’d fall asleep to a horror movie, but then I saw you with my own eyes.” His voice is still weird, but Woojin recognizes some fondness in there, and he lets that new information sit in the back of his mind to be dealt with on another day. “Were you bored?”

“Food coma,” Woojin says automatically, then realizes he doesn’t make any sense because he’s answered a question Chan hasn’t asked. “I wasn’t bored. If the movie was boring I wouldn’t have chosen to watch it, right?”

“I dunno,” Chan says in a tone that borders on mocking. “I don’t really trust people who watch horror movies to put their own existence into perspective.”

“Shut up,” Woojin says thickly, and thinks about how nice it is that Chan’s teasing never really hurts. Maybe it’s because Chan’s words, no matter how mean spirited they might sound coming from someone else’s mouth, never really have any sharp edges to their delivery, and Woojin has been hungering for the sort of companionship that he and Chan used to have before puberty came and made everything weird. “Your legs are so hard. Are they made of rocks?”  

Chan exhales loudly, in astonishment. “Wow. Not even a ‘ _thank you, Chan, for letting me put my heavy head on your legs while they fall asleep and threaten to secede from the rest of your body_ ,’ just ‘ _you’re a rock_.’”

“Thank you for donating your rock hard legs to a worthy cause,” Woojin says. “Happy?”

“Yeah, just peachy. Isn’t it creepy to wake up to people screaming and dying on the screen, you freak?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Woojin says, covering his mouth as he yawns. “But it’s daytime, so it’s fine.”

Neither of them move for a few minutes. Woojin closes his eyes again and basks in the moment, since Chan seems to be fine with staying where they are. This must be what the kitten hybrids are after whenever they weasel their way into Woojin’s lap, purring and eventually rolling over so that their bellies are facing upwards, in the hopes that they’ll get a belly scratch or two. 

“Minho came by, while you were knocked out.”

“Really?” Woojin hadn’t had any inkling that someone might have come around to the shelter, but he’s also a deep sleeper.

“Yeah,” Chan says. “Handsome face, kinda looks and behaves like an ahjussi?”

Woojin cough-laughs at the observation, storing it into his arsenal of things to possibly tease Minho about in the future. Minho hadn’t texted or given Woojin any heads up that he was going to come over, and he doesn’t work on Wednesdays because he has almost a full day of classes. “Did he need to talk to me or something?”

“Not sure,” Chan replies. He combs his fingers through Woojin’s hair, and pulls gently when one of them runs into a knot until the agitated mess of hair sorts itself out. “He just dropped in to say hello, I guess, and he didn’t seem to be in a huge rush.”

“Okay,” Woojin says, making a mental note to text Minho later.

“He was completely unsurprised that you had fallen asleep while watching a horror movie, but he’s kinda prickly. I don’t think he likes me much?”

“No one likes you much, Chan,” Woojin says, and Chan pretends to shove him off the couch, as Woojin wills his heart to calm down because it doesn’t mean anything, that Chan’s ears had turned red when Woojin had woken up in his lap or that he’s self-conscious about how Woojin’s friends feel towards him.

 

✤

 

Woojin remembers spending countless hours with Chan in various cafes throughout Daeheung-dong, the part of town where there’d been a lot of hidden gems left unexplored by unruly middle and high schoolers.

He’d just taken a leave of absence from university and gone back to taking care of things at the animal hybrid shelter full time. If he had some free time in the evenings, he would follow Chan to whatever café the latter was going to that day, and he’d watch creepy documentaries while Chan worked on his music arrangements. Nineteen year old Chan hadn’t had any issues sleeping, but he’d had the tendency to drink an alarming amount of coffee, and Woojin acted both as a moderator of Chan’s caffeine intake as well as someone to give objective feedback on the various compositions Chan was experimenting with.        

Their shared favorite had been Daerim Warehouse, a coffee shop that resembled a giant loft studio, with industrial styled tables and chairs, and a secret second-third floor where they’d sit and hang out. Woojin hadn’t been much of a coffee person, but the shop’s hot cocoa had been really good, so he’d always curl up at the corner booth with an extra-large version of the drink after carefully transporting it up the stairs. Chan would come up later, regular sized iced coffee in hand, and unpack his equipment while poking fun at the enormous size of Woojin’s cup.  

It had just been the two of them, isolated in a little snow globe universe of their own as they watched the world move around them. It wasn’t them against the world, just them indifferent towards the world, because Woojin hadn’t thought about needing anything else besides the soft droop of Chan’s eyelids and the perfect curvature of his top lip whenever he smiled at Woojin. Chan hadn’t needed anyone else either, because the shelter director and his other friends had discouraged him from going into the entertainment industry without going to college first, and Woojin was the only person who had encouraged him to just go after what he wanted.

_“You don’t think I’m wasting my life, trying to pursue this…thing and not go to college first?”_

_“It’s not a thing,”_ Woojin had said, _“it’s what you’ve loved since you were a little kid, right?”_  

Once, Woojin had dozed off after finishing the last of his hot chocolate. Too exhausted from the day’s work at the shelter, he hadn’t moved his laptop out of the way of his face, and hadn’t thought too much about the creases that it would leave in his cheek if he just slept on top of his touchpad and keyboard. Chan would probably head home soon anyways since it was nearing closing time for the café, and then Woojin would just cover his face up with the hood of his jacket if they ran into anybody they knew on the way home.

There’d been the tiny, dragging sensation of his laptop being closed and moved away from him, along with the gentle brush of fingers on his face and in his hair, but Woojin had been so, very tired. He’d stayed silent, unwilling to break the intimacy of Chan’s heat bleeding into his cheek by doing something as foolish as pointing it out. All he’d thought about was how much he wanted time to stop at this very moment, because with the magic of closing time at night also came the feeling that he and Chan were the only two people left on Earth, on a lonely blue planet made just for them.

In another life, Woojin might be able to have Chan all to himself, but in this life, he has to settle for being lucky enough, and he tries his best to pretend he’s satisfied with having nothing other than friendship with Bang Chan.

 

✤

 

“Oh yeah, Chan told me you came over the other day while I was sleeping,” Woojin says. “Why did you come to the shelter?” He and Minho are eating at a pojangmacha close to Minho’s workplace to celebrate him doing well on an important exam, and Minho goes there so often that the owner knows his face and his name. She’d started preparing their food as soon as she saw them because they always order the same dishes, just in different quantities depending on the day. Woojin’s pretty full, but Minho is still working his way through the bowl of tteokbokki and the remaining skewers of odeng.  

“I had to take someone else’s shift that day, so I happened to be in the area,” Minho says. “I thought I’d drop by, but then Mr. Curly Fries Hair was there.” He says the nickname with the same sort of emphasis that Sangwoo uses to tell Woojin he doesn’t like vegetables, and Woojin chuckles.

“Are you going to keep calling him that?” he asks.

“What’s wrong with it?! It’s a term of en _dearment_ ,” Minho replies. Half a bottle of soju is already making him more expressive than usual, his noise levels fluctuating erratically, and Woojin glances around to see who they’re potentially disturbing. There’s only two college students a couple tables away, and a group of middle aged men laughing even more boisterously farther away.

“Right,” Woojin says. “Because you’re super fond of him.”

“It’s not—” Minho exhales, trying to blow his bangs out of his face, and he eventually puts down his half finished skewer to scratch at his temple. “There’s a reason I don’t like him, Woojin. He’s not as nice as you think he is.”

“What do you mean?”

Minho cleans off his fish cake skewer in one smooth motion, chewing noisily before answering Woojin’s question. “I don’t know if it’s because you know each other too well, so you’re completely biased or something, but in high school, I remember him saying things about you that weren’t true.”

Woojin frowns. “Like what?” This doesn’t sound anything like the Chan he’s grown up with.

“I remember him telling a couple of girls that you were already dating someone, because they were curious about you,” Minho says, and Woojin can feel his heartbeat speeding up. “I thought he was telling the truth until I realized that you were acting completely normal, and you weren’t doing anything other than training, hanging out at the shelter, or spending time with him. All the way until the last day of high school, you never mentioned any girlfriend, and that’s when I knew that Bang Chan was a _snake_.”

Woojin does remember there being a few girls in his second year of high school who had seemed interested in him. Chan had asked him if he was going to do anything about it, and Woojin had only said that he didn’t need any unnecessary distractions. Mysteriously, the girls had backed off later on, but Woojin had never even considered that Chan might have been the reason behind it.

“I didn’t know that,” Woojin says, a little dumbfounded. His two layers of jackets suddenly seem too thick, and he feels sick in the stomach. He’d gotten the same feeling whenever he was about to take a math exam in high school, and also when he was about to turn in his leave of absence forms to Enrollment Services at his university. It’s the feeling of a total lack of control, despite how much effort he puts into making sure his life is as together as it can be. “I didn’t realize…”

“You don’t realize a lot of things, dummy,” Minho says. “You’re an expert on children but clueless about anything that involves how other people feel about you. Chan knew that too, and he’s been taking advantage of it this whole time, probably.”

“I didn’t like the attention,” Woojin says, and he wonders if his voice sounds hollow to Minho, “…from the girls, so maybe he tried to make them back off.”

“It’s not like you were a kid who couldn’t handle your own problems,” Minho says, as he tries several times to pick tteok with his chopsticks and fails, because he’s too wobbly to coordinate the move. He eventually stabs the tteok, using his one chopstick like a skewer stick. “You should have lived your own life, but he interfered. He was probably just scared that someone was going to take away your time with him.”

It doesn’t make sense, no matter how much Woojin tries to rationalize it. Chan had warned off other people from trying to get close to Woojin, while simultaneously acting distant, like Woojin was bothering him by wanting to remain as close as they’d been in primary and middle school. Unless…

“He’s weird now, too,” Minho says. “He looked at me like I was an intruder when I walked in on you guys having your afternoon nap, or whatever, and I glared right back at him. What the heck is your relationship with him, huh? Does he think you’re his friend, only?!”

“Are you jealous?” Woojin teases, hoping that Minho is too drunk and preoccupied to notice the way Woojin’s hands are shaking. 

“ _No_ ,” Minho says, fired up at the accusation. “I’m a million times better than that asshole. You’re just blinded because of his stupid dimples and unique curly hair and how _clingy_ he is, just like all of your other puppy and kitten children!”

Woojin keeps on humoring him until Minho is full of food and too tired to keep on talking, and then Woojin walks him home after paying the pojangmacha owner for everything they’ve eaten.

“You’re back late,” Chan says, when Woojin finally makes it home. Woojin nods, not really looking at him, and he shakes his phone to see the time. 12:34 AM.

“Sorry~” he says, with a small hiccup.  

Chan stirs something in a mug with the spoon he’s always looking for. “Did you drink?”

“A little,” Woojin says. He’s been careful not to drink too much this past month, though, with Chan around. “Minho did most of the drinking. He did well on an exam so he wanted me to celebrate with him.” He wants to go change into a pair of pajama pants, but Chan’s still watching him like he has more to say to Woojin. “Are you drinking coffee?”

“No,” Chan says, and holds out his mug for Woojin to see in order to show that it’s hot chocolate inside. Satisfied, Woojin rests his elbow on the counter, hand covered by the lengthiness of his hoodie sleeve. “Do you want me to make you a cup?”

“No, it’s okay,” Woojin says. “Thanks for asking.”

Chan takes a long, obnoxiously loud sip of his hot cocoa, and blinks innocently when Woojin raises an eyebrow at him. “Were you this close with Minho in high school?” he asks. He sounds… annoyed, for some reason, and Woojin squints in response to himself, because he has a bad habit of overthinking everything.

“He was my teammate in track,” he says. “We spent a lot of time together while you were off being angsty with your music theory friends.”

Chan exhales loudly. “I wasn’t being _angsty_.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Woojin says. “You were making art.”

“I was angsting away in the music classrooms because you were sucked up by your track team,” Chan says.

Woojin kind of wants to correct him, because in true technical detail, it was Chan who threw away Woojin first, but he also doesn’t want to dig up uncomfortable memories for the both of them. “And now it paid off,” he says, as he shifts the weight off of his right leg and onto his left. “You’re working your dream job. Making good music for other people with your talent and hard work.”

“That means a lot, Woojin,” Chan says. “You should come and encourage me like that in all of the meetings where they tell me a whole powerpoint’s worth of things they don’t like about what I sent in for the demos.”

“No one makes any progress if there’s no one to criticize and give them a hard time,” Woojin says. “I’m sure you’re doing great.”

“Thanks,” Chan says. “…Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah,” Woojin says, guard slightly down because of the soju.

“Are you… seeing anyone?”

Woojin is winded. A complete curveball. “What?”

“Are you dating…at all?” Chan says. “I’ve been wondering, but I never found a way to bring it up until now.”

“I…no,” Woojin says, flustered. Chan looks… relieved, and that makes a hundred different alarms and sirens go off in Woojin’s brain. “Why…?”

“I dunno. Just curious,” Chan replies, then says, with an air of nonchalance, “Ahh, will you sing just one song for me? I know it’s late, but I’ve been sleeping better lately because of your lullabies.”

“Only well behaved kids get lullabies,” Woojin says, and Chan pushes lightly at his chest, annoyed. “Finish your hot chocolate first.”

“That means you’re going to sing for me, right?” Chan says, with one of his signature tiny laughs.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Woojin responds, and goes to change into more comfortable clothes while Chan chugs the rest of his hot chocolate.  

 

✤

 

Happiness, for Woojin, is like blowing soapy bubbles in the air and watching the iridescent spheres hit the ground one by one. There’s an undeniable high, but it’s accompanied by a catastrophic end, and joy comes with an expiration date every time he gets a sneak taste of it. Woojin lives his life in a daze, closing his eyes so that he can’t see the bubble around him expanding slowly, getting closer and closer to the day that it’ll pop. 

Sangwoo has a cold, and Woojin had promised Jeongyeon he would make sure the kitten boy gets put in bed earlier. Before that, though, he wants to check in on Chan, who’d gone out through the back door for a phone call earlier in only a thin T-shirt and still hasn’t come back. It’s too cold to be outside for more than a few minutes in that sort of outfit, and Chan shouldn’t get sick in his last week of staying in Daejeon. 

Woojin retrieves the bomber jacket Chan wears most often from Chan’s bed, slipping his hands into the sleeves and pulling them outwards so that they’re no longer inside out.

He stops just a few feet short of the screen door when he hears Chan’s voice, slightly muffled but still distinguishable from the murmur of the evening wind. Chan’s back is facing towards the doorway, so he doesn’t realize Woojin is there.

“I know, I know,” Chan says. “I miss you too.”

He has his phone on speaker mode, but Woojin can’t really make out what the other person says, only that it’s a girl’s voice. “I’ll be back in Seoul by the end of the next week, and we can meet up whenever you have some time off, okay?”

His voice is so…soft? He never speaks to anyone like that, especially not Woojin, and Woojin’s chest feels like it’s trying to collapse and rebuild itself back up over and over again. He withdraws from the doorway, hand dropping to his side with Chan’s jacket still in it.

 _We’re not kids anymore_ , Woojin thinks bitterly, because he’s always known that growing up means growing apart, and that he’s too old to cry out for things he wants but can’t have, like Chan being around for more than a few holidays and weekends out of the whole year.  

 _We’re not kids anymore,_ Woojin chants to himself, and he goes to put Sangwoo to bed. He feels nothing as he tumbles into bed afterwards, still holding onto Chan’s jacket and pressing his face into it. Chan’s gentleness, and the affection in his voice as he spoke on the phone are a painful reminder that Woojin hasn’t been part of Chan’s life for the last two years, and that he’ll never really be, because Chan isn’t in Daejeon to stay and he doesn’t owe Woojin the details of every one of his personal relationships. Friendship, no matter how sincere or long-lasting, means so little when there’s miles and miles of city in between.

Woojin has been singing and playing the guitar every day for Chan since he tried it out the first time, and he’s learned a few new songs so that neither of them get bored while Chan tries to fall asleep. Today, Woojin might have to skip out.  

On a chilly Sunday night, the bubble of happiness in Woojin’s chest finally bursts, and the soapy suds of a reality check feel more like arrows lodged in the spaces of his rib cage, making it hard for him to breathe.   

 

✤

 

A few days later, Hyunjin corners Woojin in his puppy-like sort of way on the second floor, mumbling that he’s got something _important_ to talk to Woojin about and it has to be as soon as possible. He’s holding onto a rubber hot-water bottle that Felix must have prepared for him, because Hyunjin gets frequent stomachaches from the cold. Hyunjin is also a bit of a klutz, despite his image, and tends to burn himself a lot whenever he’s trying to heat something on the stove, so Felix probably volunteered to heat the water out of a sense of duty.

“Do you want to buy something?” Woojin asks, when Hyunjin’s anxiety gets a little overwhelming, his tail thumping at the ground and his ears constantly moving as the rest of him remains stiff and silent. “You know I don’t mind, as long as it’s reasonable—”

“It’s not that,” Hyunjin says.

“Then…?”

“Can I ask you something, Woojin hyung?” Hyunjin asks. Why is everyone trying to ask Woojin things, lately?

“Yes, Hyunjinnie,” Woojin says. “What’s up?”

“And can you promise me,” Hyunjin says, “that you won’t get all weird and choked off or mad when you answer it?”

Woojin’s stomach feels like it is sinking, but this is Hyunjin, and Woojin reminds himself that the least judgmental people in his life have almost always been the ones with furry ears and expressive tails. “Choked off? Depends on what the question is, but I won’t be angry,” Woojin says. “Have I ever been angry at you for asking something?”

“No,” Hyunjin says, with a pout. “You just put on your _leave-me-alone_ voice and tell me to help with chores instead of being nosy.”  

Woojin laughs at how much Hyunjin has mastered his understanding of Woojin’s conversational style. “I really won’t be mad, so go ahead and ask whatever you want to know,” he says.

Hyunjin looks like he’s about to bounce off the walls from nervousness, before he finally asks, “Do you like Chan hyung?”

“In what sort of way?” Woojin asks.

“Like, romantically,” Hyunjin says, then adds, unhelpfully, “Like, holding hands and getting married and lovey-dovey stuff.”

“No,” Woojin says, brain going into default defense mode. Machine Woojin’s insides whir and come to life, but there is no protocol yet established for a question this loaded and this difficult to answer. “Why do you ask that?”

“Because I want to know,” Hyunjin says. His eyes dart around, searching for something in Woojin’s face. “Did I…make you upset?”

“I’m _not_ ,” Woojin says, as he takes a deep breath, “upset with you.”  

“Just because you don’t express it on the outside, doesn’t mean you’re not feeling some type of way,” Hyunjin says. “It’s the same with you never being fully sad, or fully happy. You’ll always come in to save the day when it’s someone else’s feelings being hurt, but all of your emotions are repressed and stopped up somewhere in your body and I don’t know when you’re going to explode.”    

Feelings, no matter how much you hide or pull or pinch at them, are uncontrollable when they outgrow the boxes that you initially shoved them in. They leak through the stitched seams of shoes and fight their way through bone and muscle and skin until they’re everywhere, free from the walls which originally trapped them.  

Woojin wishes he had some excuse, some answer for Hyunjin that would flow out of him as fast as his feelings are spilling into the wooden floors between them. He feels weak in the knees, and wonders if he’ll continue to get away with lying to Hyunjin when he hasn’t done a very good job of lying to himself all these years.

Does denial exist as a selfless gesture to preserve the peace of a household, or is it used by people who need help sleeping at night because without it, they’d never function properly again? “I—”

“You look so happy when you’re with him,” Hyunjin says, face filled with the utmost sincerity. “And now Chan hyung is going back to Seoul soon, and you look…sad, like how you looked before. I didn’t notice it before, because I don’t think I realize what it meant, but Chan hyung’s face lights up whenever you’re around him, too. In the last two years, I’ve never seen him as happy as he was these past few weeks.”  

Woojin has started getting careless, staring at Chan every chance he can get, because Chan is going to leave soon, and in another week, Woojin will be alone, as if Chan had never come home at all. It doesn’t help that Chan catches Woojin’s eyes on him, sometimes, and instead of looking away, he just smiles back with his heart shaped lips and soft dimples and curved moon crescent eyes.

 _It’s all or nothing_ , Woojin had told Chan weeks ago, but Woojin doesn’t think he can give it his all anymore.  

“Don’t cause trouble where there is none,” Woojin says, folding his arms across his chest. “Chan is straight.” He thinks about the phone call he’d overheard, and how Chan’s voice had been so…hauntingly pleasant, and how it had immediately given away what type of relationship he had with the person on the other end of the line.

“He’s…what?” Hyunjin says, his eyebrows raising high on his forehead and then furrowing again. “I’m not trying to cause trouble for you, hyung, but I’m not dumb either. You and Chan hyung have taken care of me since I was little, but that means I’ve spent a lot of time watching you guys, too.”

“We don’t like each other like that,” Woojin says, authoritatively. He blinks a few times, the blinds of the windows to his thoughts pulling shut in avoidance. “We’re friends.”

“Okay, Woojin hyung,” Hyunjin says, gently, and the easy acceptance of his voice is so unexpected that Woojin does a mini double take at him. “I’m just saying that, every single one of us wants you to be happy. You’re allowed to do whatever you want, and spend time with whoever you like most, no matter what anyone says or thinks. Whether it’s Chan hyung or someone else.”

“Okay,” Woojin says.

“I’m always here, hyung,” Hyunjin says. “I know you’ve always kept things to yourself, but I’m grown up now, and I can take some of the weight off your shoulders.”

“My considerate oversized puppy,” Woojin says, weakly, and Hyunjin grins in response, taking Woojin’s hands into his and putting the rubber hot-water bottle on top in order to warm their fingers.      

 

✤

 

By the time he’d turned seventeen, Woojin had become a master of concealing. Chan had stopped shying away from him, because Woojin knew how to behave like other boys, now, and touched Chan where it was appropriate for teenage boys to touch each other, and only in fitting situations.

To everyone’s relief, Woojin had stopped fighting and stopped acting out, despite the fact that the turmoil in his head had never quite stopped. He’d gotten used to the way his senses would screech as they went into overdrive, blocking out the rest of the world’s noise and imagery for a few moments while he watched nameless shapes and forms move in front of him. Watching his own life as an outsider, the worries of high school students had seemed so arbitrary, so small and inconsequential. Then, everything would flood back in after a few seconds and he’d be pulled back into the present world, ears ringing louder than he liked.

He’d reminded himself, every single day, that boys who liked boys better than they liked girls didn’t live happy lives, and Woojin had been willing to live the rest of his life _alone_ , as long as it meant another bullet point wouldn’t be added to the list of reasons why he was a broken product of the system.    

He’d looked at Chan from across the classroom and hadn’t thought about holding hands with any of his male friends because they were too old to be doing such childish things, while two girls at the set of desks next to him had linked arms and crowded into each other’s space, faces pressed together to watch a video on one of their phones.

 

✤

 

The night before Chan’s due to go back to Seoul, he and Woojin take a bus that will drop them off at the closest stop to the river. It’s within tolerable walking distance, but Woojin is bringing his guitar and it’s best to cut corners where they can. The weather forecast had predicted clear skies and no rain for the evening. Woojin makes Chan bring an umbrella anyway. 

“You look so handsome carrying your guitar on your back like that,” Chan had said, on the bus, his eyelashes fluttering dangerously, and Woojin had rolled his eyes at him in place of any verbal reply. The swaying of the bus as it made its slow, sweet way down the road had lulled Woojin into a brief nap, and he’d woken up to Chan telling him that they were nearly at their stop. Woojin had half stumbled down the steep steps of the bus exit, keeping himself just awake enough not to land on his face in the wet mud and grass.    

“Actually, there’s probably a reason why I can’t sleep very well,” Chan says, when they’ve found dry pavement and both sat down, Woojin carefully unzipping his big protective bag to take out his guitar.  

“I thought you were sleeping better,” Woojin says, not looking up. He accidentally hits his guitar in the process of freeing it from its shell, and the strings make a soft _clang_ in protest. He quickly stops the noise by laying his fingers flat against the vibrating steel strings.

“I am,” Chan says, and sighs before he continues. “But it might get worse when I go back.”

“Oh,” Woojin says, unsurprised. “Did something happen with your job or one of your songs?”

“How did you…?” Chan’s eyes widen.

“You avoid working on music at all during the day time, but you’re always staring at your laptop if you can’t sleep in the early morning. I figured it had something to do with being in Seoul and your job, if it was making you stay away from your music that much,” Woojin says.  

“You never asked,” Chan says.

“You weren’t ready to answer, right?” Woojin says. “I don’t like when people are nosy, so I didn’t want to ask.” He hates being pushed to talk about himself, and he doesn’t think anyone’s obligated to share their problems just because they’re having a hard time dealing with them.

Chan’s staring at him strangely, eyes glassy, and Woojin’s throat feels dry with Chan’s full attention on him. “Thank you,” Chan says. “For not pressuring me.”

Woojin only hums in response. The refreshing breeze he’d felt as he got off the bus has now turned into a biting wind, and he pulls his hoodie up over his head before tying the drawstrings into a floppy bow underneath his chin. Chan seems kind of nonfunctional, so Woojin moves his guitar so that it’s laying flat on his legs, and he leans over to pull Chan’s hood up, too, tying the same goofily shaped bow around Chan’s chin.

“It happened a few months ago,” Chan says, breaking the comfortable silence. “It’s not directly related to the company I mainly work for, but a smaller job I was doing on the side.”    

“I see.”

Chan says, “It’s one of the reasons I was given such a long break. The other two composers I work with, Changbin and Jisung, have some level of influence in the company, so I was able to take a mental health breather.”

Woojin hums in acknowledgement, the names ringing a few bells in his mind. _SPEARB_ and _J.ONE_ are frequently listed as co-composers along with CB97. Since Chan’s moved to Seoul, Woojin has had a habit of reading through even the smallest print of discography credits.

“Basically, I was hired to compose songs for this smaller company’s new group a year ago. They had an interesting concept, and all of the members were animal hybrids of some kind,” Chan says. “I felt like…personally attached to them, because we’ve grown up our whole lives being surrounded by animal kids, you know?”

“Right,” Woojin says.

“So I was really excited to take the job. It was fine. The whole job was fine, nothing went wrong during the actual songwriting process because they were really easy and really great to work with,” Chan says. “But a few months ago, their company went up in flames and the higher ups were being investigated for abuse towards all of their trainees and idols.”

“Oh no,” Woojin says. “Were they getting physically abused?” 

“I think it was confirmed that they were being beaten really badly as punishment for not performing well, but I don’t know if there are any sexual allegations that went public,” Chan says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. I was so overwhelmed when the news first came out.”

“I get that,” Woojin says. “You haven’t been in touch with them?”

“Their company was pretty strict about them keeping in touch with people so I have no clue how to reach them other than through their online Instagram accounts, which are also probably managed by the company. Part of their contract or something,” Chan says. “I couldn’t really sleep that well, knowing that I had been in such close contact with them and never felt anything off about them.” 

“You were only hired to compose for them, right?” Woojin says. “It’s not like you were even part of the company, or like you saw the abuse happen and stayed quiet.”  

“I know that, in my head,” Chan replies. “But logic isn’t really helpful when the psychological part of your head refuses to operate logically, right? I didn’t think it was weird back then, but each idol was wearing black, long sleeve everything despite the fact that I was recording with them in the summer.” A dry laugh escapes from him, but there’s no humor in it.

“Prevention always seems easy in hindsight,” Woojin says. “If you had really thought something was wrong, you’d have spoken up.” 

Chan sighs and rubs at one of his eyes. “Thinking about that makes me conflicted too. Like, if I had actually seen anything weird, would they have tried to silence me to do a cover-up, or whatever.” He wiggles his feet, smacking the toes of his sneakers together as he pauses. “I was taken in for some questioning from the police, which was fine, but right after, I found out that the idols I worked with couldn’t even terminate their contracts legally to get away from their abusers.”   

“That’s terrible,” Woojin says.

“Yeah, it is pretty terrible,” Chan says back, and he stares up at the night sky. Woojin looks up too. They can’t see the stars from here because there’s too much air pollution, but it’s calming all the same, to see the dark purple wash over the city, an astronomical blanket.

“Some nights I wasn’t sleeping at all, so Jisung finally kicked me out of the studio we work in because I refused to leave. He’s a little bossy, even though he’s three years younger than me,” Chan says, chuckling.

“Sounds like he knows what’s best for you,” Woojin says. Jisung’s meddling had brought Chan back home to Daejeon, back to Woojin, even if only temporarily.

“He does,” Chan says, “both in music and in my bad methods of coping with stress, I guess.”

“That’s good? That you have someone like that in your life,” Woojin says, genuinely. Unlike Chan, he’s seen as the authority figure of the household as long as the shelter director isn’t around, and no one really questions his behavior when he’s stressed, not even Hyunjin or any of the other three high schoolers. Woojin has no one to tell him he’s overthinking things and no one to point out when he’s making poor decisions, either. No one to tell him to take a break before he falls apart and puts himself back together out of necessity.

“Coming back here, spending time with all of the kids and Hyunjin and Felix and you has really…helped me,” Chan says. “I think at the very least, I won’t be so burnt out when I return to my job.”

“You being around has made the kids a lot happier even if your mere presence is a distraction,” Woojin says, grinning.

“So kind to me, despite it being my last day,” Woojin says, sticking his lower lip out.

“The kids will send you off with all the good wishes you could ever dream of tomorrow,” Woojin says.

“What if I want them from you?” Chan says, tilting his head. It’s not bright out, but under the light of the few street lamps lining the street, Woojin admires the paleness of Chan’s skin, and how adorable he looks bundled up in a denim jacket with two more layers of clothing underneath. “Aren’t you going to send me off?”

“I’ll think about it,” Woojin jokes, and Chan leans over to push at his shoulder, making Woojin squeak as he teeters off balance and nearly loses his grip of his guitar. “If my guitar gets a single scratch I’m going to send the repair bill to your fancy office at JYP.”

“Go ahead,” Chan says. He leans back, propping his arms behind him. “I’m going to try and come visit a lot, though it won’t be every weekend. I have so little time, and it always takes forever to make the trip from Seoul to Daejeon.”  

“Alright.” Woojin picks up his guitar and gets into position to play. “Well, since it’s your last day here, I’ll let you pick a song, traveler.”  

“Are you iTunes?” Chan teases. “It’s not like you ever listen to what I suggest anyways.”

“I _listen_ ,” Woojin says. “You just make poor choices, and I am kind enough to correct them.” Chan probably doesn’t realize, that he’s always severely underestimated how much Woojin cares. It’s why every time Woojin wakes up in the middle of the night, his first instinct is to look across the room and check if Chan is asleep, and it’s also why any time Woojin sees something that’s the same, weird taupe color as Chan’s favorite jacket, he takes a mental picture of it in consideration for future gifts.

“The song that you always sing, then,” Chan says. “‘ _Lost Stars_.’”

“You’re not sick of that yet, Mr. Composer?” Even as he questions Chan’s choice of song, Woojin finds the proper frets and positions his fingers accordingly.

“No, never,” Chan answers. “I like your version even better than the original singer’s.”

“A high compliment,” Woojin says, and faithfully, starts to sing.

 

✤

 

When Chan goes back to Seoul, Woojin looks out into the rain from the porch and does not let himself feel anything.

Later that night, he lies in bed, and he thinks that a little piece of his heart’s been caught on the zipper of Chan’s bag and gotten dragged one hundred forty kilometers north, too, along with the man he’s been in love with since he was six and will probably be in love with forever. Love that hurts this deep can’t possibly be temporary, and Woojin squeezes his eyes shut as he wistfully waits for sleep.

 

✤

 

Woojin kisses Chan thirteen years after they meet, and regrets it for the next two.   

It happens in a moment of greed, of temptation, of weakness.

Chan’s curled into fetal position, probably because he’s only dressed in a loose tank and cotton shorts, and the air conditioning tends to make the rooms too cold. His laptop and MIDI keyboard are still laid out to the side of him, the laptop’s screen dark and power button blinking blue before it goes into full sleep mode. Woojin gently moves the laptop and USB connected keyboard out of the way so that Chan doesn’t end up rolling over into any of the cords.

“You’re going to catch a cold like that, and then I’m going to have to deal with it,” Woojin says, even though he knows it’s a lost cause. Chan doesn’t even stir at the sound of Woojin’s voice.  

Chan’s body is on top of the blanket that’s already on his bed, so Woojin grabs another one from the shelter’s extra stash in the storage cabinets down the hallway, the one that’s bright pink with orange and blue flowers all over it. He drapes it carefully over Chan’s sleeping form, who snuggles into the warmth even if he’s not awake enough to know what has suddenly taken away the cold.

Woojin sits down on the floor, cross-legged, and leans forward so that he can fold his elbows and rest them on the bed. Reaching out gently, Woojin uses his thumb to smooth out the skin at the top of Chan’s nose bridge, in between where his eyebrows sit, and Chan’s facial expression finally relaxes. Not really thinking, Woojin lets his fingers continue trailing down the bridge of Chan’s nose, skipping the tip of it to trace the cupid’s bow of Chan’s lips.

 _It wouldn’t hurt_ , the voice inside Woojin’s head whispers, and before he can think about anything else, Woojin presses his lips to Chan’s. It’s only for a brief second, but the rush of unfulfilled feelings and arousal and guilt burn his lips like a hot iron. He pulls back, conflicted now that he’s given into curiosity, and spends the rest of the day hoping that Chan had truly been asleep.

 _I only want so little. Why can’t I have this much, at least?_ Woojin thinks to himself. _I won’t ask for more._

A week later, Chan receives a job offer to be a composer for JYP. “I’m moving,” he says, not even looking Woojin in the face, and Woojin tries not to fall apart like he did when they were fifteen and too young to know any tact.

Later, he lets himself fall apart in the confines of his blankets, and doesn’t cry, just wonders if he’s going to feel this empty and unwanted for the rest of his life.

Fifteen years after they meet, Woojin feels the same sort of greed creeping up on him. _Friendship_ is an easy concept to understand and follow when feelings behave rationally on paper and follow the rules of theories written by important men. In reality, though, Woojin has lived an infinity of moments watching the curve of Chan’s back and wishing it was his to hold. He’s waded through the depths of too many oceans, pulled under by the pressure of taboo feelings and drowned by his inability to move forward or back in time or space.

In a parallel universe, Woojin might be able to keep his feelings at bay and stay by Chan’s side without the tide of emotions washing up on the shore, drenching him over and over again. In another universe, Woojin might not even love Chan, but in this one, Woojin is like a moth in search of a bright light, and he’s constantly drawn to Chan even though it’ll destroy him in the end.

Maybe it’s selfish, for Woojin to go back on his promise of all or nothing, but he’s so tired, and all he wants is a clean break.

 

✤

 

Chan picks up the call right away, probably wondering why Woojin is calling when Woojin never voluntarily calls anyone. “Woojin?”

“Chan,” Woojin says. He cracks a knuckle, thinking about what he’s going to say next. It’s a good thing it’s not raining right now because he doesn’t want to have to make the phone call inside, where Hyunjin or someone else might hear him.

“What’s up?” The scraping of chair legs can be heard, and the click of a door being shut as Chan presumably leaves the room he’s in to have more privacy and avoid disturbing anyone else.  

“Do you have time to talk for a while?” Woojin asks.

“Yeah, of course,” Chan says. “I always have time for you.”

 _I always have time for you_. Woojin’s lip hurts from him biting it so hard.

“Do you remember, when I told you it was all or nothing?” he asks. He can hear Chan huffing out a laugh over the line, in his tiny, quiet way, but his tone is patient when he answers Woojin.

“Yeah,” he says, with a hum. “When we fought while we were eating dakgalbi and had to eat burnt chicken at the end?”

“Yes,” Woojin says. The memory is warm, but his hands are cold and clammy from anxiety. “I know I told you it was up to you, but I…I have to say no to you, this time.”

“What do you mean?” Chan sounds alarmed.

Stolen glances, stolen touches, stolen moments. Secret, hidden, terrible affection has navigated how Woojin’s interacted with Chan for years, and it’s a route he no longer wants to follow.

“Between all or nothing, I’m choosing nothing,” Woojin says. His vision blurs, a little, and he wipes at his eyes even though he knows Chan can’t see what he looks like right now.   

Chan is silent for a few seconds. “So you don’t want to be friends anymore? At all?”

“It’s too hard for me, Chan,” Woojin says, voice breaking.

“This better be a joke,” Chan replies. He sounds like he wants to yell or cry, but he’s forcing himself to keep his voice quiet. “You’re breaking your own— _our_ promise.” He also sounds furious, and Woojin can’t fucking _breathe_.

“It’s not,” Woojin says. He pulls up the hood of his sweatshirt to wipe at his wet cheeks, then puts the phone near his face again, smiling. “Sorry that I half-assed it, in the end, Channie.” 

“Don’t call me that,” Chan says. “You don’t get to call me Channie when you’re being an asshole, Woojin. Why are you doing this?”

Woojin exhales, shuddering as he tries to collect whatever’s remaining of his composure. He can’t cry, because if he lets himself cry openly, he might be able to fill a whole ocean with his tears. “Because I can’t be honest, and it constantly hurts me to be around you. Because it _sucks_ , to only have you on the other side of a phone call. Because we spent years living in each other’s pockets, as each other’s everything—and now your permanent home’s in Seoul, where there are people you care about more than me.”

“What are you..? That’s not true, Woojin,” Chan says. “Can’t we talk about this more?” Woojin can hear him sucking in a breath, like he doesn’t know what to do. He’s just as upset and broken as Woojin is, but Woojin doesn’t hear it in the midst of his own chaotic thoughts. “I don’t—”

“I’m selfish, Chan,” Woojin says. “I’ve never said no to you because I wanted to be a better person for you, so I pretended. The truth is, I don’t want to share you with other people because you were mine _first._ ” 

“Woojin…”

A lifetime of pretending to be perfect, so that Chan would have no reason to leave him. After all that effort, where Woojin is has absolutely no meaning, because in the end Chan _still_ chose to leave him under the pretense of pursuing music, and Woojin is too tired and too fucked up to keep up the image of a selfless best friend anymore.

In order to go to the way they were before, when things weren’t so complicated, Woojin has to let _go_.

“We have to talk about this in person,” Chan says, and Woojin wants to scream at him to just move on, because there’s nothing’s left for them. “You don’t get to decide things all by yourself, Kim Woojin.”   

“…Oppa?” a softer, feminine voice says. “Is something wrong?”

“Oh, Yerim,” Chan says, voice far away. “Can you give me a second?”  

It’s an extra dagger into Woojin’s side to know who Chan’s with, and only the last remaining bits of his manners stop him from hanging up without saying anything.

“I’ll text you later, Chan,” Woojin says, knowing that he definitely won’t.

Chan probably knows that too, because he says urgently, “I’m going to call you,” and Woojin hangs up.

It starts to drizzle right after Woojin comes back inside, and he leaves his phone on the shelf next to his keys and a bus ticket as he begins to pack.   

 

✤

 

“I’m going to go away, for a few days,” Woojin tells Hyunjin, later in the evening. They’re sitting in Woojin’s bed, Hyunjin curled up lazily in Woojin’s lap after giving up on studying any more for the day. Fifteen minutes ago, Woojin told him to go shower and sleep, and yet, Hyunjin is still here.   

Hyunjin keeps his eyes closed as he asks, “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” Woojin says. “Temples, I think. Trails. Museums?”

“By yourself?” Hyunjin says, looking up at Woojin.

Woojin nods. He’d managed to get each of the shelter’s part timers to pick up a couple more shifts in order to cover his absence for a couple of days, and the shelter director is staying in Daejeon this week, so he’d asked her beforehand to take care of some of the overnight duties for him.

Woojin scratches behind Hyunjin’s ears affectionately, and Hyunjin, by habit, melts into the familiarity of the touch. “Do you remember, when you asked me if…if I was in love with Chan?”

“Yeah,” Hyunjin says. He scratches at his neck, and shakes out his bangs when Woojin drops his hand. “Are you still stuck on that, hyung? It’s fine, you know—” 

“I guess am,” Woojin says, “still stuck.” Hyunjin’s floppy ears straighten up in surprise at the unexpected admission, his eyes round and big.

“Hyung?”

“To be honest with you, I’ve known the answer to that question since I was fourteen, or maybe even earlier. I just never really…” Woojin pauses, “wanted to think about it?”

Hyunjin rolls out of Woojin’s lap, long limbs unfolding, and sits up straight. “Woojin hyung…” he says. “Are you…Did you tell him how you feel?”

Woojin’s guitar is propped up in the corner of his room, still in its protective case. He hasn’t touched it since the night he and Chan went out to the river. Woojin’s relationship with Chan is a little bit like his guitar, or like a song that’s on _pause_ more often than it’s on _play._ Maybe it’s time for both of them to hit _stop_ , and switch onto new, different melodies before they come back to each other again.  

Woojin shakes his head. “No.”

“Why not?” Hyunjin asks, forlorn. “You don’t even know if he feels the same way!”

“I didn’t tell him in exact words, because I’m still afraid to lose him,” Woojin says. “Because I still want a chance at having a whole lifetime with him, and my feelings will get in the way of that. They’re a burden on our friendship.”

“…Is that why you’re always sad when he’s not around?” Hyunjin asks, and Woojin just looks at him, knowing that Hyunjin will find the answer in his face.  

“I’m telling you this so you don’t think I’ve disappeared to drown myself in the ocean or something,” Woojin says. He balls up a dirty t-shirt on his bed, and tosses it into his laundry basket across the room. “I won’t do anything dumb. I probably won’t return anyone’s calls very much, but I’ll check in with you as much as I can. You and Felix and Seungmin stay until really late at hagwon, anyways, so me not being around to cook won’t be a problem, and…” he trails off, unable to finish. He happens to make eye contact with Hyunjin, again, and he regrets it the moment he does.

Hyunjin looks like he’s going to cry, and Woojin is going to cry too, because unlike him, Hyunjin has always worn his heart on his sleeve and showed the full intensity of his emotions to everyone he loves, while Woojin has spent his whole life training himself to conceal what he feels on the inside from other people, so that no one could ever deem him unfixable. Despite his efforts, though, he’s still ended up a little bit cracked and a little bit too broken to repair.

“It’s not that dramatic,” Woojin says, and he can hear the hollowness of his own laugh. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“I know,” Hyunjin says. “It’s just that, you’ve probably deserved a trip like this for a long time, and it makes me sad to think that you never, ever talk about how you really feel.”

“It’s not because I don’t trust you,” Woojin says. “It doesn’t mean I love you any less.” 

“I know that, too. I don’t want you to feel like you have to change if you don’t want to, because you’re just fine the way you are,” Hyunjin says, leaning closer towards Woojin. “I love you, hyung. You know that, right?”

“Yes,” Woojin says, and drops his head onto Hyunjin’s shoulder. He feels so exhausted, like the world has collapsed on top of him without considering holding any of its own weight, and he lets himself be hugged like a small child.

 

✤

 

After a long bus ride, Woojin successfully arrives in Busan, still sleepy from his nap during the ride. He shakes off the grogginess by stretching, and after pulling his hood up to protect his face and head from the wind, he looks for the bus station where the 101 bus runs. Nearly an hour later, he steps off the bus at Taejongdae park.

 _In Busan~_ , he sends in a text to Hyunjin, who replies back within a minute.

 _Nice, hyung. Bring me food._ Hyunjin sends a sticker of a crying bear whose stomach is growling, and Woojin laughs, slipping his phone back into the butt pocket of his jeans.

The cliffs are nothing like he’s ever seen before. Photographs online don’t do the real place any justice. Against the strong teal of the ocean, the rock formations are breathtaking no matter where Woojin looks at them from. In the view from above, in the lighthouse, they look terrifyingly beautiful, small white stairways and scattered visitors looking like thin white lines and black dots in a massive canvas of nature. When he actually stands on the rocks, though, they’re a lot less intimidating due to their smooth, flat surfaces, and he looks out into the distance, two hundred meters above the sea.

He spends a long time staring out into the water. It stretches all the way into the horizon, miles and miles of deep blue and emerald green meeting with the vast, clear sky. He laughs, when he thinks about how horror movies and the cliffs of Taejongdae Park give him the same sort of emotional relief, and remind him that in the big picture, he’s just one small little creature out of billions of others trying to survive. Problems are problems, but in the face of such awe-inducing structures naturally created by the Earth, Woojin feels a little silly for feeling trapped back home in Daejeon. His heartbeat is so calm, and maybe Woojin should just sit around on giant rocks for the rest of his life to avoid thinking about anything other than how big the ocean is.       

At the foot of the lowest cliffs and all along the beach are various tents of all different sizes and colors. When Woojin gets closer, he realizes that there are people selling what looks like strange fresh seawater catches.

“What are these?” he asks one woman, curiously. The tables are filled with piles of fleshy-looking sea creatures, some of which look like food while other ones are so brightly colored that they don’t seem edible.

“These are abalone, these are mussels,” she says, in a slight accent which Woojin recognizes as Busan-speak as she points. She continues pointing to the other selections. “Sea cucumber, sea pineapple. All caught fresh.”

“Oh,” Woojin says, blinking as he thinks. “Can I have some of each?” He exchanges a few thousand won bills for a plate of assorted seafood, and looks around for napkins and eating utensils. The woman notices and points him in the correct direction, to the other end of the long table. “Thank you~”

“Not from here?” the woman asks him.

“No, just visiting. I live in Daejeon,” Woojin says, and she nods, telling him to enjoy his food. He goes to sit at one of the foldable tables they’ve set up for any customers to use. Wiping his hands dry on his windbreaker, he takes out his phone specifically to take pictures of his food, which he’ll show Hyunjin later just to rile him up because Hyunjin hates seeing squishy, wet things.

He catches the bus back to the main Busan station, and browses the shops in the area for a while, buying some tofu soup to-go from a small family restaurant and snacks from a convenience store before he goes to wait for the bus that’ll take him to his Airbnb in Haeundae.

The host isn’t present when he checks in, but earlier in the day, she’d texted him the keypad code for the unit he’s staying in so that he can let himself in. He sends a text to tell her he’s arrived, and sets down his belongings before taking a look around the place.

On one side of the room, there’s a white, modern styled desk that tucks nicely into a corner, with a few fake potted plants for decoration and a small black lamp on it. On the other side is a low bed in a wooden frame, gray blankets folded neatly at the head of the mattress with pillows stacked on top of them, and there are clean towels rolled up next to a hot water kettle, unplugged, on top of a large white dresser.   

The best part of the apartment is the window, which takes up a whole wall, one of the glass panes having a handle and door contraption that allows that particular square to pull down and fresh air to be let in. Even just sitting on the bed, the view is amazing, and he can see the majority of the ocean shoreline on Haeundae Beach, warm blue afternoon rolling to a close as the sun sets and evening takes over. The other buildings nearby are much smaller in size since Woojin can see their bright green rooftops easily, and their lights, along with the buildings and communities in the distant shoreline, glitter like stars in a clear night sky.

After a short nap, Woojin wakes up to the room being dark and turns on the lights before undoing the knot on his plastic bag of take out. He eats his tofu soup at the small coffee table next to the window, watching the ripple of ocean waves and using it to calm his own mind.    

The next day, he visits Haedong Yonggungsa Temple, getting up early in the morning so that by the time he gets there, he can still avoid the large crowds. He takes the 139 bus there and sits in the front, shrinking into himself to keep warm. Even with all of his layers, some of the morning cold still sneaks in, and it’s foggy outside the whole way there.

To get to the temple, he gets off at the National Fisheries Research and Development Institute stop, and takes a ten minute walk to the actual temple by following the signs posted along the side of the road and the directions he remembers searching up last night. It’s still relatively early in the morning, with only a few people walking around and a pervasive fog that surrounds the whole temple. Woojin feels like he’s walking around in an imaginary world, isolated from the rest of civilization as he explores the temple built on top of rocks.  

A few food vendors are set up already, preparing to sell their specialty snacks and meals with the kind of energy and enthusiasm that Woojin can only admire and never emulate, and he buys hotteokk to enjoy while he observes the twelve zodiac statues lining the path to the main entrance of the temple.

There are exactly a hundred and eight steps to walk down in order to reach the part of the temple that’s closest to the sea, and they are just as hard to navigate as they look, rugged steps inconsistent in both width and depth. He’d read about how the number 108 is important for a variety of reasons in Buddhism. One of the explanations is that 108 is what you get when you multiply the six natural senses by their three types (painful, neutral, pleasant), three time zones (past, present, future), and two sources (internal/external).

Woojin takes his time going down the steps, watching with half concern, half amusement as a woman in front of him walks down the steps in chunky high heels and holds onto her boyfriend for support. To each their own. Sadly, Woojin does not have a handsome boy to grip onto and coo at lovingly, so he settles for taking slow, careful steps in his descent, wrapping his hands in the extra fabric of his sleeves and shoving them in the pockets of his windbreaker. Not many paper lanterns are set up this time of year because they only do it near the celebration season for Buddha’s birthday, but Woojin is here for the rocks and sea, not so much to seek out festivities.

At the very bottom is a platform where visitors can look at the temple’s main buildings from afar as well as observe the ocean. Sections of red fence, some connected and some just individual parts, line various parts of the cliffs for protection where people might slip and fall. The fog of the land extends out into the water, too, and Woojin feels a different sort of peace as he drinks out of his coffee-filled thermos than he had at the cliffs in Taejongdae Park, with the silvery atmosphere of the sky and the deepness of the sea. The rock formations that are completely submerged below the water’s surface look like black, looming creatures lying dormant in hibernation.     

There’s a tree where visitors can write their worries on strips of paper and have them hung in order for their wishes to come true. So many strips of paper have been added to the structure that from far away, it probably just looks like a giant blob of white, but closer up, it’s an attraction in itself too, thousands of different peoples’ dreams and aspirations written in black ink on white sheets, left behind in a temple by the sea. Woojin initially plans to bypass the activity and find more spots on the cliffs to sightsee and take photos, but a young woman in her twenties approaches him. 

“Would you like to write your wishes down?” she asks, holding out a handful of white strips of paper. “The worker gave me too many, so if you’d like…” 

“Oh, sure,” Woojin says, taking one from her. “Thank you.” She smiles at him briefly before she goes back to her family, who are huddled near the tree of hanging paper wishes, talking.

With both of his hands, Woojin holds up the paper, thinking about how he’s never made a serious wish in his life, and how he’d stopped making them all together after he was seven. Everything he’s ever wanted has either been reasonable enough for him to work towards himself, or so far out of reach that he only considers them pipe dreams, tucked away in a part of him that still thinks about happy endings and universes where he and Chan are meant to be. He has more worries than wishes, anyways, but maybe a worry is a wish for something troublesome to disappear, so Woojin figures he might as well.

 _May the path of life remain clear of harm and filled with blessings for everyone I love,_ he writes, and hands in 2000 won to watch his wish be hung up on the tree.

He walks around on the cliffs for a while. Back in Daejeon, it’s never silent for too long, because of all the animal hybrid children that require frequent attention and constant care, but out here, he’s washed up in a sea of strangers, with all the time in the world to think and no one’s schedule to worry about except his own. Once he’s had his fill of exploring the cliffs, he prays in front of Haesu Gwaneum Daebul, the Seawater Goddess Buddha of Mercy and visits the indoor temple to pray as well.  

Woojin spends the rest of his trip in similar fashion to his first two days, traveling in solitude and staring out at rocks and sea. He texts Hyunjin random photos of stray cats and brightly painted walls when he visits Gamcheon Culture Village, and saves the pictures from his visits to temple and nature destinations for himself, because they feel a little bit too vulnerable to share even if he’s always behind the camera and never in the photos.    

He mostly eats alone, grabbing take out on the way home or ordering delivery when he’s too tired to think about looking for food. On his last day in Busan, his Airbnb host insists on meeting him in person and taking him out for dinner, sending him a flurry of friendly yet threatening emojis until he accepts her offer.

Chan calls, too. He leaves a voicemail on his third failed attempt to reach Woojin, but Woojin is too afraid to listen to it, so he keeps putting it off.

Since the day they met, Woojin has never been out of reach for Chan. He’s always been at the shelter, a rock of stability for everyone both by choice and by duty, with no way to run from his problems except to ignore them. In his selfish moments, he hopes that his absence stings Chan just as much as it had stung him, like the overwhelming sense of loss he’d felt when he’d come back to their room right after Chan had left for Seoul, the air feeling empty and also full, of words that had been left unspoken between them. In his more rational moments, he hopes that Chan isn’t thinking about him at all and is letting all of this blow over with time.

Chan probably isn’t looking for Woojin, though. He just wants to talk to Woojin over the phone and figure out how to go back to old times, and he won’t ever understand what it means to care so much about someone that you can’t be _around_ them, because he’s straight and he’s dating a soft spoken girl who probably makes his heart beat the way he makes Woojin’s thunder.

Woojin tests out a thousand different explanations under his breath before he sleeps each night of his trip, and never finds the right one.     

 

✤

 

The next morning, Woojin gets on the bus back to Daejeon, muscles feeling sore and heart feeling lighter, and heads towards home with his feelings carefully tucked away in the pockets of his mind. He’d gotten all of the sighs out of his body while walking on steep trails and rocky cliffs, but his mind is clearer, now, and he’s not as afraid as he was before he came to Busan.   

“Hard times will pass,” an elderly woman had said to him, when Woojin had been waiting at a bus stop after he’d finished exploring the colorful buildings and art work of Gamcheon-dong.

Woojin points to himself in confusion. “Are you speaking to me?”

“You’ve sighed three times in the last minute,” she’d said. She’d been wearing a striped, colorful shawl over a blue shirt and orange pants, and her head had been covered by a big sunhat. “Things will change throughout the rest of your life. They don’t always stay difficult.” Her smile had been comforting, even if she’d been a little eccentric.

Strangers are so interesting, in that you can say whatever you want to them and essentially never see them again. Woojin had wondered what so deeply compelled the woman to initiate a conversation with him, when most people liked to pretend that they were standing next to thin air if they were standing next to a stranger.

“Thank you,” he’d said, and then his bus had arrived, cutting their conversation short and preventing Woojin from finding out any more about the woman.  

Hours later, Woojin groans softly to himself as he hops off at his bus stop and starts the ten minute walk back to the shelter. It’s around noon now. His body is probably grateful for the exercise but Woojin’s brain isn’t, and his feet hurt so much that he just wants to collapse in some wet grass and call it a day.

Woojin’s heart just about stops when he finally reaches the shelter, and sees someone in the doorway. The man is wearing a puffy jacket Woojin can recognize from a mile away, hands shoved into the pockets as he sways from side to side and listens to music, earphone cables swaying with him. His lips are posed in a natural pout, and he’s probably thinking about how to make whatever he’s listening to even better than it already is.

Instead of a proper greeting, all Woojin can manage to get out is a strangled, choked up _why_ , and the man turns around at the noise. 

“Woojin,” Chan says. He takes his earphones out and starts coiling them into a neat bundle. “I came as soon as I could after your phone call, but Hyunjinnie told me you went on a trip, so I’ve been waiting around for a day or two.”

“It’s too cold for you to be wearing ripped jeans,” Woojin says, brain on autopilot. He can hear blood rushing in his ears as he scrolls through the other options in his head. He kind of wants to run back to the bus that had dropped him off, and disappear into a city Chan will never find him in.  

“Fashion,” Chan says. Woojin doesn’t know why Chan keeps smiling at him. “Remember?”

“Yes,” Woojin says, looking down.

“Can we talk?” Chan asks, and Woojin whimpers, which makes Chan laugh.

“I just got back from a four day trip,” Woojin says. “You can’t spare me for at least another day?”

“No,” Chan says. “I have to go back soon. I just wanted to make some things clear between us.” 

“Okay.” Woojin grips his backpack strap tighter, preparing himself and his whole body for the rejection that Chan is probably going to deliver with the gentlest of smiles and apologies. It sucks that it’s only the middle of the day, because that means Woojin can’t even sleep his heartbreak off for seven hours after Chan inevitably realizes that Woojin looks at him with heart eyes all the time.

“Did you have a good trip?”

“I think so,” Woojin says, and inhales sharply as Chan takes a step closer towards him.

“Guess you didn’t have any time to check your missed calls?” Chan asks, with a quiet, timid laugh.

“Not really,” Woojin says. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Chan replies. “Good thing I caught you in person, then.”

“How did you know that I’d be coming back today?”

“We have the same dongsaengs,” Chan says, with a wink. It comes out more as a blink because he can’t voluntarily close one eye smoothly, and in any other situation, Woojin would laugh. Right now though, all Woojin can think about is how terrified he is of facing the truth when it’s not on his own terms. “Anyways, I’m here to make good on my end of our promise. Didn’t we say we’d give it all or nothing, Woojin?”

Woojin shakes his head. “I can’t give you all, Chan,” he says. “I can never be completely honest with you.”

“That’s okay,” Chan says, and Woojin stares at him, confused. How can it be okay with Chan, that Woojin has been _pretending_ to be his friend this whole time when he’s always wanted more? “We can start small. We can start with me.”

“…You?” Woojin echoes. “What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t tell you the whole story, about why I came back to Daejeon,” Chan says. He’s smiling, but he looks…scared, like he has something to _lose_ , and Woojin wonders if it’s due to a trick of the light that he sees all of his own emotions reflected in Chan’s face.   

Woojin had thought Chan’s return to their hometown was just a trip back to get away from the things Chan didn’t want to think about in his day to day life, to heal from a situation that he felt guilty for not realizing was happening. “You didn’t?”

“It’s easy to lose sight of yourself, if you work in the entertainment industry and you see the not so pretty side of things on a regular basis. Sometimes I came home to my apartment not knowing who I was or what I stood for,” Chan says. “So I came home to Daejeon, because soul searching has to start at the roots of where you come from, and I wanted to be somewhere else to think about what I honestly wanted in life and how I wanted to move forward from now on.”

“Okay,” Woojin says. “And..?”

“Then I saw you,” Chan says, and Woojin’s heartbeat stutters. He gets a whiff of cologne because Chan’s so close to him, and he wonders, idly, why Chan is wearing cologne when he’s just visiting to tell Woojin he doesn’t love him back. “And I realized that I would never be happy as long as I continued lying to myself.”

“Lying…?” Woojin searches for signs in Chan’s face, for a signal that makes sense to him. He can’t allow himself to get his hopes up without any real basis, but Chan keeps fucking smiling at him. “Chan, you can’t possibly—” Ice drops from Woojin’s head to his feet. “Do you…?!”

“I’ve loved you forever, stupid,” Chan says, voice cracking, and he reaches out to grab at a corner of Woojin’s jacket. “For someone who’s been watching over me since we were six… for someone who’s always understood me when I don’t always understand myself, how could you _not_ have noticed the most important thing?”

For a few seconds, there’s nothing in Woojin’s head, and then all of it processes and he crumples to the ground. “Oh god,” he says, as the corner of his jacket slips out of Chan’s fingers. He feels dizzy.

“What? What’s wrong?” Chan says, grabbing onto Woojin’s shoulders.  

Woojin’s legs feel like pudding. He wants to stand up and reassure Chan that he’s fine, but his legs are too weak so he just asks from where he’s sitting on the ground, “Does that mean you don’t know?”

“What don’t I know?” Chan asks, panicked. He squats down, so that they’re looking at each other eye to eye. “Is there something I’m supposed to know? Woojin—”  

“I kissed you when we were nineteen, while you were sleeping,” Woojin says, shaking, because he’s never said this out loud to anyone, not even himself, and he doesn’t know whether he wants to cry or laugh hysterically at the way Chan stares back at him, completely stunned. It’s clear that he never knew, but Woojin had thought otherwise for two years. “I thought you left home because you had found out that I liked you, and you wanted to get the hell away from me.”

“No,” Chan says, breathlessly. His eyes dart around, scanning every part of Woojin’s face, as if he’s re-examining every single conversation they’ve ever had, every word Woojin has meant in a different way than Chan has taken it. “No way. I never…I had no idea, Woojin. I would _never_ disappear on you, for a reason like that.”

He throws his arms around Woojin with such force that Woojin almost loses his balance. Without any hesitation, Chan buries his face into the space in between Woojin’s jaw and neck, not saying anything, just wrapping his arms tighter around Woojin. Woojin slowly lifts his hands and links them around Chan’s waist.  

Woojin has spent over seven hundred and thirty days holding his breath because of guilt and anger and regret, and now he can finally _breathe_.

“Kim Woojin!! Does that mean you’re in love with me too?” Chan asks. It comes out muffled because he hasn’t moved his face or loosened his grip on Woojin at all, and Woojin shivers at the way Chan’s lips move against his neck.

“What does it look like?” Woojin says, and Chan pulls back to look at him in total bewilderment. Woojin groans. “Yes, you dum—“ He doesn’t get to finish that insult because Chan interrupts him by kissing him on the lips. It’s fire, and freedom, and butterflies all balled up into one, and Woojin thinks about how nice it is to be able to hold Chan’s waist against his in real life after dreaming about it for years. 

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Chan asks, when he pulls away. Woojin is still reeling from the heat of Chan’s mouth on his. Nothing feels real. “I’ve always…it always felt like you hated me.”       

“Because I could lose you,” Woojin says, and pauses. “Because I thought I already lost most of you, and I wanted forever for us, even if it was just as friends.”

“I’m sorry,” Chan says. He lets go of Woojin to stand up, and pulls Woojin up with him. “I left home because…”

“Because you were following your dreams,” Woojin says, knees still feeling like they might buckle any second. “I know.”

“Not just that,” Chan says. He bends down to swipe at the dirt that’s stained Woojin’s jeans, holding Woojin’s thigh in place while he does it because he seems to know that Woojin’s still shaky. Woojin loves him so much. “I was also scared of not knowing what it was like to exist without you. You were always…willing to do anything and everything for me, no matter how much I acted out or how weird I got around you, and I thought that it was only because you were too kind to tell me no.”

“That’s why you didn’t talk to me about it, beforehand, and moved out so abruptly?”    

“I wanted to know whether me being in love with you was real or whether it was something I could get over,” Chan says firmly. “I didn’t know you…felt the same about me, so I thought I was making the right choice by giving myself space to become more independent. But then my feelings didn’t change, and we just ended up with a fucked up relationship that I didn’t know how to fix.”  

“Oh,” Woojin says.

“Can I ask when you…” Chan fumbles for the right word. “When you started liking me?”

“I don’t know,” Woojin says, and Chan snorts, mumbling under his breath about how _un_ romantic Woojin’s answer is. “Look, I just grew into it, so I can’t tell you an exact day and time, alright?! Let’s just say forever, asshole.”  

Chan’s snort turns into a full on laugh, and Woojin scrunches his nose at him. “Let’s see _you_ give a time and date then!” Woojin says.

“Since we were fifteen,” Chan says. “Or maybe since the first day I met you, because I had felt so scared and you immediately made me feel like everything was going to be okay. You still make me feel like that, you know?” The heart shaped curve of his lips as he smiles at Woojin is so darn _cute_.

“…I do?”

“Yes,” Chan says. “Because in Seoul it always feels like everything is falling apart and I don’t have enough time to do anything extra, but whenever you’re near me it’s like…I can appreciate how nice the rain sounds, instead of thinking about how I hate getting my clothes wet, and I can slow down to live life instead of being on overdrive and overworked mode all the time.”

“Why, Chan, that’s pretty…cute,” Woojin says, with a tone that clearly means he hasn’t decided whether it’s a little bit gross, too, and Chan shoves him in the shoulder.  

“I’m allowed to be disgusting,” Chan says. “I had to hold in all my affection for years. I bet I’m all emotionally constipated now.”

“You think _you’re_ emotionally constipated?” Woojin makes a unhappy _hmph._ “You don’t even know what you put me through.”

“Are we fighting about who loves who more right now?” Chan asks, and he almost seems to light up at what he’s just implied.

“No,” Woojin says, pushing the rise of warmth in his stomach back down. “No discussion needed for that because I’m the only lovable one, between the two of us.”

“Fuck you,” Chan says, even though there’s no real bite in the words, and he pushes at Woojin’s chest in irritation, making Woojin laugh.

“I’m getting hit so much today,” Woojin says. “Don’t you have any mercy for my poor muscles?”

“You get hit because you deserve it!” Chan says, and Woojin makes an ugly face at him, showing how much he doesn’t agree with Chan’s statement without actually saying anything. 

“Oh, right,” Chan says, when they’ve gathered their wits and moved inside the shelter to talk more. “Do you want to eat something?”  

Woojin puts down his backpack and duffel bag, and realizes that remarkably, their roles have been reversed. He’s never allowed himself to dream of a moment like this, and it feels surreal, to be the one coming home from a trip and have Chan waiting for him in the shelter where they grew up together.

“I think I’m good,” Woojin says, smiling at Chan.

“Okay,” Chan says. “Water, then?”

“Yes, please,” Woojin says. He puts his face right above the cup of hot water when Chan places it in front of him, taking in the steam and letting moisture collect on his cheeks.

Even though they’re sitting at ninety degrees to each other, Chan takes his chair and scoots it closer to Woojin’s. “This doesn’t feel real,” Chan says. He pinches Woojin on the leg, and Woojin yelps in surprise. “You’re real though, so it must be.”

“You’re supposed to pinch yourself, not the person in your dreams,” Woojin complains, rubbing at his thigh. Then he remembers what had made him so sure that he and Chan would never work out. “…I thought you were dating someone.”

Chan asks, “Where did you get that idea?”

Woojin licks his lips. “You were calling someone a couple nights before you left Daejeon,” he says. Chan narrows his eyes and looks upwards, like he’s trying to dig through his files of memories in order to figure out what Woojin’s referring to. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I was looking for you and your call was on speaker mode. I don’t know if it’s the same girl that was talking to you in person when I last called you…?”

“Oh!” Chan says. “Yerim?”

“I guess,” Woojin says.

“She’s my…” Chan starts over. “I didn’t want to tell you yet, but I guess now’s as good a time as any. You know how there’s a Seoul branch of the organization that manages our shelter, right?”

“Yes,” Woojin says. “What does that have to do with her?”

“She’s one of the animal hybrids there,” Chan explains. “I ran into Jihyo noona once, and she was telling me how they were starting some life mentor program for the animal hybrids, where they can have a chance to get guidance and become friends with an older hybrid or someone who has lived in the shelter before. Like pen pals, but not writing letters and not long distance.”

“So not pen pals at all,” Woojin teases, then says, “I get it, yeah.”

“So noona said that even though I’m human, I have a personal connection to the shelter and it would be interesting if I could be part of the program’s experimental stage. I told her I was fine with it, and she connected me to one of the animal hybrids that was having a hard time adjusting. That was when Yerim and I met,” Chan says. “She’s like…fourteen? I think of her as a little sister. She was…troubled when we first met, but we’ve warmed up to each other a lot since then.”

“Oh,” Woojin says, feeling silly. He might as well have a banner running across his forehead with the words _King of Jumping to Conclusions_ written on it.

“Was that…part of the reason you didn’t want to be friends anymore?” Chan asks. “You mentioned during the call that the people in Seoul were the ones I cared more about.”

Woojin purses his lips. “Yeah. I was in a weird headspace. And you have your own life there, so I felt stuck…? Like I was in a snowglobe I wasn’t allowed to leave.”

“I’ve met great people in Seoul,” Chan says. “They all mean a lot to me because they were there for me when I was feeling sad and homesick. But they’re not you, Woojin. They don’t know what to say to me when I’m having trouble with something, since everyone thinks that just because I make good music, I can’t possibly fuck up in any other part of my life. They don’t always get what it’s like to feel…lost, like a ship at sea without any idea of where it’s going or who it still has on board.“  

Woojin nods. He feels like a lost ship sometimes, too, when Minho talks about his parents or when Jeongyeon mentions going out to eat with her older sister, because he has no stories of his own to connect with theirs. “I get that.”

“When people realize how we grew up, they don’t know what to do. It’s like they’re looking at an _out of order_ sign on a vending machine, except that the machine has eyes and is looking at them too,” Chan says, with an amused laugh. “I’m not broken, though. When I’m looking for comfort, I’m not looking for someone to fix me so that they can feel better about themselves.” He puts his hand on top of Woojin’s. “I guess I’m just looking for someone who will listen to the very end of all my sentences and sing me the same song over and over as long as I ask them to.”

“Wow,” Woojin says, wetting his lips. “What specific requirements.”

“I think you might fit them,” Chan says, playing with Woojin’s fingers by spreading them out individually, pushing them flat on the table, then placing them close together again.       

“I might,” Woojin says, and sips at his water, still a little bit in disbelief that he came home with the intention of going separate ways with Chan and somehow ended up getting to keep him.

Chan stares for a long time at Woojin, gaze traveling from the top of Woojin’s head to his face, then to his chest and lower torso. Like he’s re-learning what Woojin looks like, and memorizing. He eventually asks, “This makes us boyfriends, right? I can call you mine?”

“Yes,” Woojin says. “I suppose so.” _Boyfriends._ The word sounds so nice rolling off of Chan’s tongue, and Woojin is in a daze. It’s so amazing, that Chan’s seen almost every side of him and still wants the same thing from Woojin that Woojin wants from him. Woojin is going to spend the rest of eternity with a stupid fat grin stamped on his face.   

“You _suppose,_ ” Chan echoes, looking unimpressed. “No half-hearted shit this time around, Woojin. I’ll beat your ass into the ground, and then you’ll be short a boyfriend _and_ a leg.”  

Woojin just laughs in reply, and leans forward to rest his cheek on top of Chan’s hand.

“What are you going to do when the kids graduate?” Chan asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you considering going back to college, or…” Chan hums. “What are your overall plans?”

“I don’t know about college,” Woojin says. sitting back up. “I’ll probably end up withdrawing entirely, but I haven’t figured out exactly when. I probably have about half a year to another year to decide.”

“Do you want to continue working at the shelter, then?”  

“Yes…? For sure,” Woojin replies. “I’ve lived my whole life taking care of animal children.”  

“I know, I mean… _this_ shelter,” Chan says. He lightly drums his fingers on Woojin’s hand. “Does it have to be Daejeon?”

Woojin blinks a few times at him, inklings of realization seeping into him. “Chan?”  

“You could move to the Seoul branch and live with me,” Chan suggests, quietly. “It would be nice to be able to see each other without a long bus ride in between us. We could play music together in my apartment and annoy my neighbors. We could make songs together, you know, like we did in primary school, only they’d be way better, and I could take you to meet all of my friends whenever I want instead of just showing them photos.”

When Woojin is silent for a few more seconds, Chan gets fidgety. “Or not? We can make it work if you do want to stay in Daejeon.”

“I’d have to think about it,” Woojin says. It’s so much to take in, but he can already see it in his mind, a future where the two of them have only a few meters between them instead of entire cities. Instead of feeling trapped in a place where only Chan can come and go, Woojin has the choice to go to him, too. “I’d have to talk to the shelter director, and Jeongin, and the rest of the kids—”

“Is that a yes?!” Chan breathes out, face lighting up in the most beautiful way, and Woojin laughs at his impatience.

“It means ‘maybe,’ you load of rocks,” Woojin says.

“Thank goodness,” Chan says, breathing a sigh of relief. “I thought you were going to say no, for sure.” He’s still holding onto Woojin’s hand and he brings it up to his face, where he nuzzles his nose against their meeting skin.  

“Have I ever really said no to you?” Woojin says, and the intimacy of Chan nuzzling his hand makes shivers run up his spine. “It’s just…my job involves children. I can’t up and take off from my job like you without any consequences. I can’t change my whole life around without planning it out first.”

“Okay,” Chan agrees. “I can wait. If I lived through fifteen years of waiting in order to have a day like today, I can wait through anything.”

“You’re so…” Woojin trails off, and Chan just beams back at him.   

“Talk to the shelter director first,” Chan insists, and Woojin agrees, overwhelmed with how much of his life is changing every time he blinks.  

 

✤

 

After Chan leaves, Woojin finds the shelter director in the garden, wearing dark work clothes and thick gardening gloves instead of her usual flowy skirt and cashmere sweater. She looks up from her weed-plucking when he approaches, smiling at him. 

“Oh, Woojin-ah,” she says in greeting. “How was your trip?”

“It was good,” Woojin says. “Saw some really nice rocks and what not.”

“That’s good,” she replies, not questioning his utterly dull depiction of his Busan travels. “Busan always has so many great things to see and do. You should go back whenever you have the chance.”

“And create a huge hassle of employee shift changes every time I want to go exploring?” Woojin says, with a laugh. “This isn’t going to be a frequent thing.”

The director hums softly. There’s a loose chunk of hair hanging in front of her face, and she tries to shake it out of her face. Woojin reaches over and tucks the hair behind her ear, earning him a grateful smile from her. When she had rescued him, her hair had been jet black. Now it leans more towards silver, because the white hairs are starting to overpower the black ones and Woojin hadn’t fully realized that as he’d grown up, she’d grown older too. “There’s a job position that will open up soon at the Seoul branch of the rescue organization for animal hybrids, for a manager,” she says. “How do you feel about a transfer?”

“Me?” Woojin says. Transfers sound like they’re for people working at large corporate companies, not lost boys taking care of hybrids at a shelter. “I’m just…I’m not anybody.”

“Not true,” she says. “The organization doesn’t base your competence on your education level or where you went to university, but your affection for animal hybrids and ability to create a safe environment for them to grow up in. I’ve known since you were barely walking and already hugging the animal hybrids, that you’d be wonderful with them when you grew up.”

“Thank you,” Woojin says. “I…I would love to, but there’s a lot I have to consider. Jeongin is still only in his first year of high school, and there are some younger hybrids who are attached to me, so I can’t easily leave.”

“It’s all up to you,” the director says, and Woojin is always thankful, that she’s tried to be as supportive of him as she can despite how busy she is and how many people she’s a parent to. “It’s your life. You’ve always worried about other people’s feelings before your own, but you’re allowed to be selfish sometimes, Woojin-ah.”

 _You’re allowed to be selfish._ Woojin thinks about Chan quietly asking him to move to Seoul and what the director is implying. He thinks about Minho pointing out Chan’s behavior in high school, and Chan moving away not because he had wanted to get away from Woojin, but because he’d wanted to figure out if his own feelings were legitimate.

Life isn’t about waiting for coincidences and wishing for things to fall in place at the right time. If you want something, you have to chase it, and Woojin thinks that…it’s worth the risk, to take a jump across an abyss of the unknown, because he has Chan waiting on the other side for him, and their roots are intertwined too deeply for anything to pull them apart.  

“Has Chan already talked to you about this, by chance?” Woojin asks.

“Briefly,” the shelter director replies, smiling. “We all want the best for you, Woojin-ah.”

“I…Thank you,” Woojin says, and he bows slightly at her. 

“Let me know if you’re interested, when you’ve thought it over,” she says. “I’ll give them a call and put them in touch with you.”  

“I will,” Woojin says, and he leaves her to her weeding.

 

✤

 

On Chan’s birthday, Woojin makes a trip to Seoul alone. With college exams approaching, none of the third years are able to free up their schedules, and Jeongin has tests to study for too. They half study, half watch him with sad eyes as Woojin gets ready to leave.

“Chan will understand,” Woojin tells them. Hyunjin’s pout doesn’t budge, and Woojin laughs. “You can make it up to him later, when your exams are out of the way, okay?”

“Okay,” they mumble collectively, and Woojin takes turns ruffling every puppy boy’s hair as a goodbye before putting on his shoes and leaving. He buys a small cake from a bakery in the neighborhood and carries it carefully, trying his best not to jostle it on the bus ride.

Nearly two hours later, he’s in front of Chan’s door. He can hear the soft pitter-pat of footsteps walking over to unlock the door, and then the door beeps twice, the second one a higher note than the first, before it swings open. There’s a young teenage girl standing in front of him with brown floppy ears on her head, one of them more crooked than the other. She’s wearing a cream colored cardigan on top of a t-shirt dress that seems a little or a lot oversized on her.  

“Hello,” Woojin says, a little confused before he remembers that this must be Yerim. “Are you Yerim?”

“Yes, my name is Choi Yerim!” she says, eyes bright, and she moves out of the way so that Woojin can come in. “Do you want me to put this somewhere for you?” she asks, referring to the cake box in his hand.

“Yes, thank you,” Woojin says, and she gingerly takes it from him before silently gliding towards what Woojin assumes is the kitchen area. She comes back just as he’s changing from his sneakers into indoor slippers and her bare feet stop right in front of him.

She studies Woojin’s face as he straightens up, her eyes darting around to look back and forth between him and the guitar he’s carrying behind him until she seems to put two and two together. “Oh! Are you Chan oppa’s boyfriend?!”

Woojin laughs. “Yes, I am.”

“Yerim,” Chan says, coming out from the hallway. “I told you I would get the door—” he smiles at Woojin, all teeth, before going right back to nagging. “—and will you wear your house slippers, please? Woojin only just got here, don’t overwhelm him with your energy.”  

She pouts at Chan. “I like walking barefoot on your floors, though. And I wanted to meet your handsome boyfriend, but you were taking too long to get ready!! Woojin oppa—can I call you Woojin oppa?”

Yerim is so straightforward that Woojin’s a little taken aback, but it doesn’t bother him, how friendly she is. “That’s fine,” he tells her, smiling, and she grins back with triple the wattage of Woojin’s smile.

“Woojin oppa, Chan oppa has switched outfits _three_ times, and I thought he might have been trying to change into a fourth one, so I came and opened the door instead of him, because who knows how long you would have waited outside?” she says animatedly, and Chan groans in embarrassment.

“Go back home, Yerim. You’re uninvited from this party,” Chan says, which makes Yerim squeak in protest, and she goes into the kitchen to properly put on her indoor slippers.  

“Three outfits?” Woojin teases, eyes skimming over Chan’s body from head to toe, and he smirks when he sees Chan swallow nervously. Chan is wearing a black button up with his signature look of having the top two buttons unbuttoned, and a pair of jeans in a dark blue wash.  

Chan covers his face, instead of confirming or denying anything, and Woojin laughs as he takes his guitar bag and sets it in a corner of the room where there’s empty wall space. “You’re working so hard to impress me. What happened to the Bang Chan I know, who wears the same bomber jacket for weeks on end as long as the weather permits?”

“Shut up,” Chan says, and he moves near Woojin to hug him.

“The kids wanted me to tell you that they’re sorry for not being able to make it. Exam season and all,” Woojin says. Chan smells like a different kind of shampoo today. “They were very sad and being super sulky even as I left.”

“Aw, my puppies. Of course that’s fine, I totally understand,” Chan says. He’s looking at Woojin’s mouth, and Woojin feels like a bug pinned under a microscope. “Thank you for coming, Woojin.” He leans in to peck Woojin on the cheek.

“No problem,” Woojin says, rolling his upper lip inwards as he holds back from smiling like an idiot. “I…” It’s hard to put in words how much he likes Chan, sometimes, so he just trails off and hopes that Chan will understand anyway.

 “Did you get lost?” Chan asks, eyes crinkling up playfully. Despite their height difference being small, he still has to tilt his head up a little to look at Woojin, and Woojin thinks that Chan looks…really happy, even in the middle of making fun of him. “Country bumpkin.”

“What did you just call me?” Woojin arches an eyebrow, and Chan backs up for his own safety.  

“That’s what Jisung and Changbin called me when I first met them because they’d never really heard of Daejeon,” Chan says, with a giggle as Woojin makes a motion as if to grab his neck. “I might as well pass on the ill treatment!”  

“Are they going to be coming today?” Woojin asks.  

“Oh yeah, I think they’re on their way,” Chan says. “I was actually considering having it just be the two of us today, but Yerim really, really wanted to meet you, so I figured I would make it a small party. Jisung and Changbin wanted to meet you, too.”

“Do they…know that we’re…”

“Together?” Chan finishes for him, and Woojin nods. “Why wouldn’t they? Yerim knows.”

“Yerim’s part of your personal life,” Woojin says. “Jisung and Changbin work with you, so that’s a little different. Not everyone is…”

Chan takes Woojin’s hand and tangles their fingers together. “Woojin. Do you know what they said to me, when I told them about us?”

Woojin shakes his head.

“Changbin shouted ‘ _So when you are going to bring him around?!?_ ’ and Jisung said, ‘ _That makes a lot of sense, hyung,_ ’” Chan says, voice changing comically when he imitates his colleagues’ exact words. “I can’t speak for everyone in the world, but the people around us don’t care about stuff like that, Woojin. They just care that we’re happy.”

“Okay,” Woojin says, the knot in his stomach gradually unravelling at Chan’s reassurances. “Do you talk a lot about me? For them to want to meet me.”

“Inadvertently, maybe,” Chan replies. “Must be because you’re always on my mind~!”

“You’re a flirt,” Woojin says, biting his lips so that he doesn’t smile. “You’re going to get cavities from all the sugary things you say.”  

“You don’t flirt enough!” Chan says. “I’m just making up for all the years we could have been kissing each other.”  

Woojin is speechless, and he can feel his ears burning with embarrassment. “Oh, your ears are red,” Chan observes, and Woojin covers his ears with his hands defensively.

“It’s your fault. You can’t just say that kind of stuff without thinking about it,” he says. “Yerim is here.”  

“Sorry,” Chan says, but he doesn’t look very sorry at all, and Yerim, as if summoned by Woojin mentioning her name, comes out of the kitchen with her slippers on and an open bag of egg shaped jellies.

“I have put on my slippers,” she says, like a child reporting her good behavior to a teacher, and Chan laughs.

“You also opened _my_ bag of jellies,” Chan points out. “One polite action and one rude action cancel each other out.”

“You keep these around for me anyway!” she says. “You don’t even like them.”

“They’re not good for your teeth,” Chan says, although he doesn’t deny her claims. She just grins unapologetically at him, cheeks puffing out like a chipmunk as she chews with her mouth closed.

“Woojin oppa, do you sing for a living?” she asks, after she’s put her snacks aside in favor of learning more about Woojin. “You brought your guitar.”

“No,” Woojin says. “I do like to sing, but I’m not a professional. My job is to take care of hybrid children.”

“You take care of hybrid children?!” Yerim shouts, then covers her mouth in case she’s been too loud.

“Yes,” Woojin says. “It’s run by the same organization as the one in Seoul. Chan and I grew up together in the Daejeon shelter.”

“Wow,” Yerim says, in a wistful tone of voice. She smooths out a wrinkle in the material of her dress. “Chan oppa’s boyfriend really is perfect.”

“Chan is kind of perfect, too,” Woojin tells her genuinely, and both Yerim and Chan freeze.

“It’s no fun to talk to Woojin oppa,” Yerim says to Chan, voice solemn. “He likes you too much.”

Chan is the one to turn red, this time, and Woojin laughs at that once he’s finished laughing at what Yerim’s said.

The doorbell rings, notifying them that more guests have arrived, and Chan walks over to unlock the door. There’s a chorus of noisy hellos and shuffling of bags as two boys walk in.

“I told you guys you don’t need to get me gifts,” Chan says.      

“Do you think the rest of us walk around in life without any proper manners? Where should I put your gifts, birthday boy?!” one of them half shouts. He has a long, thin face and his hair’s a bright golden blonde. He’s about to say more, but he realizes that Woojin and Yerim are in the living room. “Oh. Hello!”

“Hello,” Woojin replies, while Yerim waves.

The other boy is less conspicuous, in his all black attire and black straight hair under a baseball cap. “Chan’s boyfriend, right?” he asks, and Woojin nods.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Changbin,” he says, pasting on a mischievous smile as he looks back at Chan. “I have been waiting to make the guy who’s made Chan hyung unbearable to be around lately.”

“What are you trying to say?” Chan asks, indignant, as Woojin chuckles.

As Changbin crosses the living room to put his bags down, he says, “He used to be all angsty and write deep lyrics, but now he’s all giggly and he keeps writing love songs.”  

“Stop _exposing_ me in my own home,” Chan says. He runs his hand through his hair. “You’ve literally only been in here for thirty seconds and you’re already making trouble.”

“Woojin-ssi deserves to know how happy you make him!” Changbin says, cackling, and grins at Woojin until Chan manages to grab a hold of his shoulders and start shaking him.

“He already knows! You’re just embarrassing me!” Chan says as he digs fingers into Changbin’s side, and Changbin only shrieks, not having the energy to fight back or escape.

While Changbin is busy trying to avoid being tickled to death, Jisung takes the opportunity to introduce himself, extending his hand towards Woojin for a handshake. Woojin shakes his hand politely in response. “Nice to meet you, I’m Han Jisung,” he says. “Changbin hyung and I work with Chan at JYP as composers.”

“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard,” Woojin says. “J.ONE, right?”

“Yes,” Jisung says, surprised. “How did you…?”

“I pay attention, sometimes,” Woojin says, smiling, and Jisung looks like he wants to ask more questions, but Yerim interrupts them before he can.  

“What did you bring?” Yerim asks Jisung, trying to look into the plastic bags he’s holding.

“Oh yeah,” Jisung says, lifting the bags to look for himself as he recalls their contents. “I brought a bunch of snacks and chips and takeout from that new chicken restaurant. No jellies, though.” He smiles at Yerim when he says the last part.

“That’s okay,” Yerim says, as Woojin belatedly perks up in interest at the word _chicken_. “I’ll take them for you and put them in the kitchen.”

“Thanks,” Jisung says, passing the bags over. “How’s your training going lately, little lady?”

“It’s going okay, I guess,” Yerim calls from the kitchen.  

Woojin blinks. “Training?” 

“Yerim is a trainee at Fantagio,” Jisung explains. “She was accepted a few months ago, so she’s been training ever since then.”       

“I see,” Woojin says. Human trainees are already in danger of being mistreated, let alone hybrid trainees. He can see why Chan has had trouble sleeping after the company he wrote songs for underwent investigation for hybrid abuse, because Yerim, who he cares about like a younger sister, is trying to get into the industry where situations like that are an unfortunate reality.

“I like the singing because it’s what I signed up for,” Yerim says when she returns from the kitchen. “I want to be a singer. But the dancing is really…not my strength.” She sighs.   

“That’s okay,” Jisung says, scratching at her ears. They’re clearly close, from the way Yerim leans into Jisung’s space without any hesitation, and their interaction reminds Woojin of his relationship with Hyunjin. “Try your best and be patient, cause that kind of thing takes time to get good at.”

“Okay,” Yerim says. “I will. I know that, too, but I want to be good now!”

“Hey,” Jisung says. “I probably made two hundred bad songs before I got one kinda okay, kinda good song, so you can think of dancing like that, too. You’ll unlock a new skill level after putting in your hours of suffering and hard work.”

Yerim nods seriously. “I’ll do that, I guess,” she says.

“Do we want to watch a movie?” Chan asks, having finished disciplining Changbin, who’s sitting on the floor looking very…well, defeated, and Woojin holds in a laugh.  

“Yes!” Yerim shouts. Changbin raises his hand to cast a timid vote for a _yes_ , and both Jisung and Woojin agree.

“Alrighty then, kids,” Chan declares loudly, turning his TV on with his remote control. “Nominate your picks for a feel-good movie!” 

“What kind of movies do you like?” Yerim asks Woojin.  

Woojin hasn’t even thought about what to answer with before Chan does it for him. “You can’t ask Woojin because he probably considers horror movies a feel-good genre,” Chan says, and Yerim gasps. Woojin thinks the gasp is out of shock, at first, but then she smiles at him, and he realizes that his interest in horror movies has probably earned him even more brownie points with her.   

“Really?!” she says, rushing to Woojin’s side. Her eyes are so wide that Woojin can probably see his reflection if he looks closely enough. “Me _too!_ And so does Changbin oppa, so maybe we can watch one today!”

“It’s Chan’s birthday,” Woojin reminds her, laughing at her completely unrestrained enthusiasm. “Shouldn’t we pick a movie he likes?”  

“Oh,” she says, like she’d forgotten, and that makes everyone else laugh. “You’re right.”

A few minutes later, they’re all settled down on the floor while Jisung sets up snacks on the coffee table and Chan gets ready to play _Up_.

(“What about some action?!” Yerim had said, at the final choice. “I wanna see people fight and things go up in flames!”

“This has plenty of action!” Chan had fired back. “And not only that, it’s got love and happiness and a cute ass _dog_ character.”)

As the first scene starts, Chan sits down next to Woojin, plastering himself to Woojin like a koala on a tree branch. Woojin tries to peel him off, because they’re not alone, but Chan comes back clingier every time Woojin manages to separate one of Chan’s limbs from him.

“You’re not going to behave?” he asks lowly, but the way Chan grins up at him, soft and open and full of fondness, makes Woojin’s veins feel like there’s liquid gold coursing through them.

When he looks up, Yerim is fully focused on the screen despite her earlier opinions about needing a movie with more action, and Jisung and Changbin are staring at him, or maybe him and Chan. Changbin looks like he’s thinking about something he wants to say, and Jisung’s just…smiling. Woojin is uncomfortable, but not in a bad way. It’s just that he’s never imagined what it would be like to be open about his affection for Chan because he’d spent years treating it as something to repress, but today, he’s received nothing but acceptance from the other people in Chan’s life.     

“You know, I’ve never seen Chan cling onto someone like that before. The true power of a handsome man,” Changbin says out loud in wonder, and Jisung shoves his friend. 

“You’re ruining the moment,” Jisung says, and Changbin verbally retreats with haste, their exchange of words making Woojin exhale loudly in amusement.

Turning his attention back to Chan, Woojin actually laughs as he realizes that Chan has somehow snuggled and slouched his way into Woojin’s lap, the back of his head resting on Woojin’s chest.

“You’re gross,” Woojin says quietly, in order not to affect Yerim’s viewing experience of the movie. “You know that?”

“Shh, I’m trying to watch a movie,” Chan replies, just as softly, and Woojin doesn’t say anything back, just kisses the top of Chan’s head as he thinks about how grateful he is for everything that’s fallen in place and led to this moment. 

 

✤

 

“I don’t have a _gift_ gift for you,” Woojin says. It’s early evening now, and he and Chan are sitting on Chan’s bed. Yerim had left as soon as they’d sung Chan the happy birthday song and had some cake, because she needed to go back to practicing at her company, and Jisung and Changbin had left an hour after her departure.   

“What do you mean?” Chan says. “I got to spend my birthday with you and a bunch of people I love! That’s all I wanted.”

Woojin smiles at him. “I still have a gift though,” he says. “Do you want it now or later?”

“Now,” Chan says, and Woojin laughs at his enthusiasm despite the fact that he has no idea what Woojin’s planned for him.

Eyebrows raised in curiosity, Chan watches as Woojin takes his guitar out. “You can’t judge me for this, okay,” Woojin says. “You have to think about the intention behind it. The _intention._ ”

“You haven’t even done anything yet,” Chan retorts. “How can I judge?”

“It’s a disclaimer so that you don’t go into it with unrealistically high expectations,” Woojin says. “Are you ready, punk?”

Chan nods, eager, and Woojin closes his eyes so that he doesn’t feel as nervous. He’s practiced this at least a couple hundred times in the last week and a half, so he hopes that it shows.   

When he finally starts to play, it’s not correct chords or fret positions Woojin’s thinking about, but the happiest moments he and Chan have shared throughout the course of their lives together so far, and the way Chan looks at him sometimes, like Woojin is the one who puts all of the stars in the sky every night and switches them out for the sun in the morning.

He sings about changing perspectives, and stumbling through life like a ship lost at sea, and learning to love himself through the eyes of another person. It’s one of the scariest things he’s ever done, because he’s sung love songs about falling in love or heartbreak without feeling much of anything, but singing this song in particular makes him feel like he’s laying all of his rawest, deepest emotions out on the ground in between him and Chan, baring the parts of him that are the easiest to wound.

It’s a cover of one of the first songs CB97 ever wrote in terms of discography credits. Woojin had listened to it on repeat for weeks after it came out, and wondered how someone who’d gone so far away from him had managed to so perfectly capture the exact same emotions that he was feeling.

And if Chan hadn’t known how much Woojin cared about him before, he should be figuring it out right about now, because Woojin singing a song from the earliest point of Chan’s composing career means that even in their temporary falling out, even in their two years of not knowing how to talk to each other, he’d never stopped paying attention to Chan for a single moment.     

“Happy birthday,” he says when he finishes the song, and Chan just kind of stares at him, eyes looking glassy.

Chan waits until Woojin sets down his guitar on the side of the bed before he pushes the slightly taller boy down, Woojin making a noise that’s a mixture between confusion and surprise. “Chan—?”

“I love you,” Chan says. Their faces are so close that Woojin can see that Chan’s eyes are wet. “You know that?”

“I—”

He’s cut off by Chan kissing him. “You don’t realize how wonderful and hot you are,” Chan says into Woojin’s mouth, and Woojin flushes in embarrassment. It’s just the two of them in Chan’s apartment, now, with no one to interrupt them and no one to hear the quiet whine that Woojin makes when Chan tugs at his hair. “I think about your arms, and neck, and eyes, and lips, and _fingers_ all the fucking time, and _now_ you do this.”

Woojin’s brain is so fried. “Do what?”

“Make a fuckin’ acoustic cover of _my_ music, _my_ song. And not just any song, but my first song to actually go into someone’s album at JYP,” Chan says, hands trailing up Woojin’s shirt. They leave dotted paths of fire up his ribcage and back. “You’re ridiculous and too good to be true and I fall in love with you again every single day. How does a person like you exist? I hate feeling emotions but you make me feel them all the time and I still think you’re the best thing to exist on Earth.”   

“I wanted to make you happy,” Woojin says, breathlessly, as Chan sucks marks into his neck, “because you like my singing, and I thought it would be nice if I could sing one of your songs.”

“I’m more than happy. I’m ecstatic. I’m bouncing off the walls with joy,” Chan says. “You’re so…”

“I’m so what?”

“ _Unreal_ ,” Chan says, wailing. “You really are.”  

He sucks Woojin off, holding Woojin’s hips down and swallowing everything when Woojin eventually comes with a high pitched whimper. “So cute~” he teases, and Woojin makes an attempt at kneeing him in the leg, but his whole body feels like goo so Chan probably doesn’t end up feeling much of a kick at all.    

“Will you fuck me?” Chan asks, whispering his request into Woojin’s ear, and Woojin’s eyes widen.

“You’re…that’s…” They haven’t talked about this point of their relationship, yet, or any of the details in fine print. Woojin hadn’t realized what Chan wanted because he hadn’t thought that far ahead, and Woojin wonders helplessly if it’s possible to faint from overstimulation of the mind.

“Is it too soon?” Chan says, looking worried.

“No, it’s just that you surprised me,” Woojin says. “Don’t you want to wait a little?”

“I have been _waiting_ for nearly seven years,” Chan complains, and Woojin bursts into laughter. “Are you going to make me wait three more, so we can make it a full decade of suffering?”

“I guess I won’t then,” Woojin says, and they somehow stumble their way through prep until Chan is stretched out enough to sink down onto Woojin’s cock, burying his face in Woojin’s neck because he’s somehow _embarrassed_ about this but not embarrassed about asking Woojin outright to fuck him.

“You feel so…” Chan says, trailing off as he moans. Everything is so hot and Woojin can’t think straight. Every sound Chan makes travels through his entire body and resonates through Woojin, too. He looks so _pretty_ like this, curls damp with sweat and sticking to his forehead, lips flushed and swollen from all the kissing they’ve done. “Can we stay like this forever?” Chan asks.   

“That would be unrealistic,” Woojin manages to reply, and he chokes in the middle of his chuckle because Chan tightens around him in punishment.

Later, when Chan’s come is cooling on both of their stomachs, he sleepily asks, “Did you talk to the shelter director?”

“I did,” Woojin says.

“Did she talk to you about the manager position in Seoul?”

“Yes,” Woojin says. “You talked to her beforehand about it, right?”

Chan nods. “I wanted…you deserve more, you know, but I also wanted you around so much,” he says. “Even if you didn’t love me back, I wanted to be around you.”

Woojin hadn’t known that Chan was willing to sacrifice his own feelings just to get Woojin to be in his life again. “Even if it was painful?” he asks.

“Yes,” Chan says. “It was painful, but the reward I get—spending time with you, hearing your laugh, listening to you sing, it’s all worth it.”

“How awfully romantic of you,” Woojin says, cooing.

“I’m going to push you off the bed,” Chan warns, lifting his arm menacingly, and Woojin kisses him on the nose as a peace offering.       

“I thought about it, and I think I’ll move to Seoul,” Woojin says. “How do you feel about that?”

Chan lights right up. “Really?!”

“Yes,” Woojin says. He’s already spoken to the hiring team at the shelter in Seoul over the phone, and started packing some of his belongings into cardboard boxes. “It’ll take time to finalize, but it’s happening for sure.”

“You’re moving in with me, right?” Chan says.

“I don’t know,” Woojin teases. “Maybe I’ll get an apartment on the other side of the city.”

“Punk,” Chan says. “You’re going to throw me away after deflowering me?”

Woojin just laughs, and wraps an arm around Chan so that Chan can’t get the leverage to hit him. “There’s no point in living anywhere that doesn’t have you in it, because you’ve always been home for me, Channie. Don’t you know that?” 

He expects Chan to be happy, of course, but he doesn’t expect Chan to stare at him in shock, then bury his face into Woojin’s neck as he sniffles softly. “I love you,” he says, as a warm tear drops into the dip of Woojin’s collarbone. “I—”

The mountain of guilt and confusion and misunderstanding between them has crumbled, their lands colliding into each other with the heat and desperation of a thousand suns.

“Yeah,” Woojin says, feeling all too much, and he rubs at Chan’s back soothingly until both of them fall asleep.    

When Woojin is twenty-one, he sleeps next to the boy he’s been in love with since he was six, and their hearts beat in time with each other’s because finding _home_ has never been about settling down in a physical place, but figuring out how to keep each other. 

 

❀✤❀

 

“I absolutely cannot do this,” Chan says, from behind him, and Woojin turns to squint at him. They’re at the bottom of a steep alleyway in Gamcheon-dong, in the culture village Woojin visited nearly two years ago.

They’d both finally managed to work their schedules around so that they could take a mini get-away vacation for a few days in Busan. Chan’s just gotten an entire mini album approved for an upcoming group’s debut, and Woojin has just finished a series of conferences regarding animal hybrid rights, where he’d presented about programs that were being implemented at the Seoul shelter to help older animal hybrids with socially adjusting in society despite the remaining discrimination policies against them.

Woojin had been thrilled at the prospect of getting to travel to a place he’s remembered so fondly with his favorite person. Only now Chan is hindering Woojin from getting to his goal, which is getting to the top of this particular alleyway, and Woojin is prepared to _toss_ the man if he can’t keep up.  

“What are you talking about,” Woojin says. He lifts his leg as he prepares to take another step. “Do you want me to just abandon you?”

“No, no, come here,” Chan says, very seriously beckoning Woojin to come hither with his _this-is-super-important_ voice. “I have something to confess. I cannot shout it from here.”

“I’m talking to you in a low volume, and you can still hear me, right?” Woojin says.

“Come downnnnn~” Chan whines.  

Woojin thinks his boyfriend is full of shit, but there is also a tiny possibility that Chan isn’t just fucking around, so with a heavy sigh, Woojin walks back down the ten steps he’s already climbed to hear what Chan has to say.  

“What’s up?” he asks.  

“My leg has been hurting this whole time, and I just wanted to let you know before I fall over and collapse on the ground and cause a scene in front of everyone,” Chan says, words coming out of him all in a rush. “So maybe we can’t go up those stairs.”

At first, Woojin thinks he’s joking, but then Chan blinks at him, pouting, and Woojin frowns.

“…Seriously? How bad is it?” Woojin asks, impatience turning into genuine concern, then shame towards himself for not having noticed Chan’s discomfort earlier. “Which leg is it?” 

“I don’t know,” Chan says. “It’s my right leg. Can you massage it for me?”

“Okay,” Woojin agrees, and he misses the way Chan’s eyes twinkle with mirth as he squats down to feel Chan’s calf and shin. “Can you walk? We should find a place for you to sit down and rest.”

“I don’t think I can walk,” Chan says, peeking out at Woojin pitifully from in between his fingers. “Will you carry me?”

Woojin sucks at his lower lip. Then, after a few seconds of deliberation, he reorients himself so that Chan can get on his back, and when Chan has his arms linked securely around Woojin’s neck, Woojin hoists him up, holding onto Chan by his legs.  

They find an empty bench about three hundred feet away, and Woojin lets Chan down gently so that he doesn’t further injure his leg. “Does it hurt here?” Woojin asks, feeling around near Chan’s ankle, and Chan shakes his head. “What about here?”

“Yeah, that’s where it hurts,” Chan says. He has his hands behind him as he reaches for something. Woojin doesn’t really pay attention because he’s more worried about what’s wrong with Chan’s leg. “Do you think it’s serious?”

“I don’t know,” Woojin says. They might have to cut their trip here short in order to go see a doctor. “I don’t see any swelling…?”

“Aha~” Chan says, with the delight of a five year old, as he manages to put a hairclip of a small yellow bird onto a chunk of hair at the top of Woojin’s head. “Got you.”     

“What are you—” Woojin says, then: “Bang Chan.”

“Oh no,” Chan says, with a fearful wheeze, “not the full name.”

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” Woojin says.

“Please don’t,” Chan begs.  

“Did you pull this cheesy of a prank just to get me to wear a bird hairclip,” Woojin says, without even the lilt of a question mark, and Chan howls in laughter.

“How’d you know it was the bird one?!”

“You kept staring at it in the store and then told me to go outside so you could buy secret souvenirs for the kids,” Woojin says. He can also feel the way the bird bobbles and bounces whenever he moves his head. The bird hair clips had been the only hair accessories in the store with springs on them. “I’m not that dumb.”

“You look so cute though,” Chan says, grabbing his phone and opening up the camera app. He taps the _capture_ button in quick succession, taking rapid fire photos like he’s afraid Woojin’s going to rip the hairclip off. “Don’t be mad. Actually, I take that back. Stay mad, because you look so, _so, SO_ cute like this.”  

“Once you’re done taking photos, I will find an alleyway to beat you up in,” Woojin says. “Maybe some tourists here will be nice enough to take you to a hospital, for your _real_ injuries.”

“No, please,” Chan says, and he’s still wheeze-laughing even as he gets up. “Can we take a kissing selfie?”

“A _kissing_ selfie?” Woojin says, not bothering to wait for Chan as he goes back to tackle the alleyway where Chan had faked an injury. “In your fuckin’ dreams, loser.”

He lets Chan take one anyways, when they’re at the top of the alleyway, outside of a bright pink building that looks like a more homey version of the Grand Budapest Hotel in Wes Anderson’s film of the same name. Chan makes sure that Woojin’s bird hairclip is in frame, and then he takes the picture right as his lips press against Woojin’s cheek.

Tomorrow, they’re going to visit Haedong Yonggunsa Temple and see the thousands of lanterns that are hung for Buddha’s birthday celebrations, and look at the ocean while they’re at it, too. On their way back to Seoul, they’re going to stop by their little shelter in Dunsan-dong, and they’re going to have dinner with Minho, who’s just recently gotten a job offer for a position at a prestigious tech company in Daejeon. Then, when they’re back in Seoul, they’re going to meet up with Hyunjin, who’s in his second year at SNU, and try to round up some of the other puppy boys, too, for lunch if they have time to come.

Two years ago, Woojin had been ready to resign himself to a life of being just happy _enough_ , because he’d thought that he was too broken and too lost to deserve anything more. He thought that he’d only get to see Chan a few times a year, and each time would be more painful than the previous until one of them just stopped trying.   

Now…

Now, he wakes up to Chan snuggled against him in the mornings, because Chan, unsurprisingly, is a cuddler. Some days, Woojin goes to the JYP building to pick Chan up for a much needed meal, and if he has the time, Chan will go to the animal hybrid conferences that Woojin presents at and send Yerim the pictures of Woojin behind the podium.

Woojin is so grateful, that the day he’d come back from his soul searching journey to Busan, Chan had been waiting for him, with enough courage for the both of them as he jumped into an ocean filled with risks, and waded in waters he couldn’t see through in order to reach for a future where both of them might be happy together.         

“Hey, did anything I just said go into your big head? What are you thinking about?” Chan asks, annoyed. He squishes his cheek against Woojin’s, and Woojin pulls away to smile at him briefly before decidedly kissing him on the lips.

That seems to momentarily shock Chan into silence, and he just gapes at Woojin. “You…you’re scandalous,” he finally says, and Woojin laughs.

“I’m not the one who took a kissing selfie,” Woojin taunts, making a face at his boyfriend.

“I kissed your _cheek_ ,” Chan screeches, then drops his volume level several notches down as a middle aged woman turns the corner and starts coming up the alleyway they’re in. “That’s different!”

Woojin hums, and decides to change the subject. “Do you ever think about what we’d be to each other in other universes?”

Chan gives him a puzzled look. “What do you mean? Like parallel universes?”     

“I took this class, once,” Woojin says, “where the instructor talked about the Many Worlds Theorem. It’s basically this idea that every time we make a decision about something, the other options still exist as alternate realities, but they just keep splitting off into more and more universes as we continue making choices throughout our lives. In the end there’s an infinite amount of worlds, each equally valid, and you have like ten million different quantum selves walking around.” 

“Sounds really cool,” Chan says, “but complicated to actually think through?”

“Yeah,” Woojin says. “You get the idea, though, right?”

“Yes,” Chan replies.

“I’ve always thought about it, what our connection and relationship would be in other universes. I thought that in some, we might just be friends, or that I might have loved you platonically, or something,” Woojin says. “But I don’t think that anymore.”

“What do you think, then?” Chan blinks once, twice.

“That in every single universe, I’d still fall in love with you,” Woojin says, and at those words, Chan’s gaze softens. “And that we’d always find each other, no matter where we started off on Earth, and in the end, we’d spend a million lifetimes together, all of them a little bit different from each other.”   

“You’re unreal,” Chan says, with a laugh.

“I think all of the quantum Chans also said what you just said,” Woojin says, “because you don’t have the brightest or widest vocabulary range, so there aren’t any extra options for your path to split off into—”

“Fuck you,” Chan says, but he’s smiling, and Woojin’s the one to laugh obnoxiously now as they start to descend the stairs down the alleyway, ready to take on whatever number lifetime this is out of the million they’re going to share.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tysm if you made it to the end ♥♥ fking heart eyes to the readers who read my end notes
> 
> this fic was a very spontaneous project that suddenly turned into a monster, and i am sleepily polishing the remaining half of my word doc as i type this author's note to you. i was not expecting to put anything out this year, because my summer was very, vERY chaotic. for the readers who know my previous work and expected a different pairing from me, i thank you for reading my work anyways. if ur here for woochan tho, hooray! let's talk about how perfect they are for each other : ) 
> 
> I am always forever grateful for any support I receive regarding my writing. In life, I often have trouble expressing the deepest emotions that float around at my core, but writing stories has allowed me to be as poetic and dramatic as I want about the feelings that I feel. 
> 
> It is impossible to use words to express just how much I appreciate being able to share my writing with readers who have shown me that the world is not as lonely and empty as I have always deemed it, and in turn, I hope my writing is a safe haven for those who are searching for some story, fictional or real, to warm their hearts. 
> 
> fun facts and disclaimers:  
> -chocolate cosmos is a beautiful flower, and its meaning is "i love you more than anyone can" which i thought was fitting  
> -many worlds theorem is something i only loosely learned about in a class about connecting math to modernism. if u really want to get into the nitty gritty technicalities, the last line implies that woojin and chan have a million lifetimes to live out with each other in a linear timeline. that is not what the many worlds theorem is about, it's saying that all of these universes exist simultaneously. (all the AUs!!! /pumps fist)  
> -there are some cultural/general inaccuracies in this fic. please forgive me anyways, i did the best i could in terms of research within a twelve day period. 
> 
> please let me know if you enjoyed this story! i am greedy for love and affection, always!!!!!!
> 
> started: 8/31/2018  
> completed: 9/11/2018
> 
>  **01/09/2019 SUBSCRIBING PSA:** if you'd like to subscribe to see future work from me, go to my profile and click subscribe there. clicking the subscribe button at the top of this fic will only subscribe you to any future updates on this specific work (which there will be none).
> 
> edit 03/21/2019: u can find me on twitter @ suheafoams (same username as ao3) i'm not super active but i sometimes post smaller bits and pieces of what i write! 
> 
> comments are much appreciated! ♥


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